eBay, says Bradford Shellhamer, the company’s head of engagement, wants to be the “heavy metal-loving, yogi, OSU fan’s favorite store.” It also wants to be yours. And with a new feature called Interests, it aims to be better at helping you find the products that match your passions.
With over 1.1 billion items in almost every imaginable category–offered by everybody from Target, Barnes & Noble, and Neiman Marcus to individual sellers–shopping on the venerable marketplace can be overwhelming, an issue the company acknowledges and has long sought to fix. Interests is designed to take advantage of the site’s unique inventory from smaller merchants, such as antiques, niche collectibles, and designer clothing items that are unavailable on rival sites such as Amazon.
To use the feature, shoppers fill out a short questionnaire covering a few categories, clicking on favorite topics in categories such as hobbies, sports teams, and styles. eBay then combines that information with data from previous searches to generate tailored product recommendations specific to each customer, cutting across shopping categories.
Leading the effort is Shellhammer, the founder of ill-fated e-commerce startups Fab.com and Bezar and eBay’s personalization honcho since March 2016.
As he imagined what eBay could become, Shellhammer looked beyond the retail world to the music industry. For instance, Spotify’s “Discover Weekly” personalized playlists served as an inspiration for Interests. The Interests questionnaire was influenced by the questions Apple Music asks users in order to provide them with the best possible recommendations. “We want you to tell us what you like, let us look at your behavior, and get you into your own personal store,” he says.
“Everyone’s a little weird”
Asked what he learned working on Fab.com, a design-focused e-commerce site that sold in 2015 for a fraction of its peak value, Shellhammer says that he “realized that taste doesn’t scale–Fab was based on tastemakers making decisions for you, but I realized that it shouldn’t be about me. What we sell on eBay is not a founder’s vision . . . It’s the user’s vision.”
The company has already rolled out an image search tool and an AI personal-shopping concierge for Facebook Messenger. Recommendations started out relying heavily on looking at what users had recently bought; now previous purchases are just one piece of the puzzle as eBay factors in other information, such as location, and tailors product discovery more specifically to individual shoppers.
“We think it’s a question of getting people to walk into the right store,” says Shellhammer. “Everyone’s a little weird, and we want a store that caters to that.”
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