Ebay is one of those giant parts of the internet you can sometimes forget even exists. Founded nearly three decades ago, it’s far from the freshest face in retail. As Gen Z arrived online, the early dot com’er was outmaneuvered by startups ranging from StockX to Thredup, and its revenue has been stagnated around $10 billion (which is still roughly 20x the size of StockX) for the past few years.
But over the past 12 months, the company’s internal design team has been staging a quiet glow up. Dubbed Ebay Evo (short for evolution), the project began as a makeover to Ebay’s core UX—and that work snowballed into a complete matching makeover of the Ebay brand.
Built to woo millennials and Gen Z, the system isn’t as cool as SSENSE or as stuffed as Shein. Rather, it follows much of what we’d consider best design practices in layout and information design on the modern web—all without appearing too cold to middle America.
“We think about it as humanist design—it is about bringing that softness and warmth, to remove hard edges, soften the experiences, embrace white space, and give hierarchy its rightful place,” says Ebay Senior Director of Design, Tyler Moore.
Redesigning Ebay
To kick off the project, Ebay highlighted its 15 most trafficked parts of the site, which represent 98% of all user activity. So far, it has redesigned nearly half of them.
“This is a 30-year-old company next year. It’s important we don’t move all the furniture around at once and create chaos,” says Moore. “There’s no metaphorical toggle switch to say, ‘here’s the new design!’”
Still, each addressed piece of site has received an significantly updated design language that’s grounded in modern responsive UX, white space, and a fresh grid system softened by plenty of radial corners.
The most popular page—Ebay’s search results—offers the best evidence of this new approach, with every sharp corner sanded off of the experience. Ebay cut just a few lines of text off each listed result, but it makes a world of difference when you compare the before and after. Thankfully, the cuts include the urgent red text that used to mention how many any given item had sold (as if someone only bought a pair of shoes or a laptop because 879 other people had already).
That new listing page, with its big hero shot, looks strikingly similar to the popular shoe retail site StockX. Though in truth, it’s not all that different than the last version of Ebay. The anachronistic sidebar promising users that they can “shop with confidence” with links like “save this seller” has been removed, making more space for product. It looks like Ebay designers zoomed into the entire left hand side of the page—which is pretty much exactly what they did, as various links from that right bar were moved further down the page.
“We did intensive testing for customer sentiments and insight about what they want to see. It’s about reduction: [tuning] the noise to signal ratio,” says Moore. “But then, also, yes. Bringing bigger imagery to life was highly successful when tested.”
The rest of the brand
You can see much of this design sensibility inside the Ebay’s branding and marketing materials—where two other elements work to distinguish the design as Ebay.
The first element is the brand palette, which is an extension of Ebay’s red, yellow, blue, and green logo—what my eye calls honey mustard and lilac break out of Ebay’s typical Crayola starter pack approach to color.
The second element is the video and photography. Product photography—especially that taken in front of white backgrounds (as much of Ebay’s is)—can be tricky to distinguish. Moore says the trick was to mix in humanity wherever possible.
“Ebay is 100% about the customers on our platform. That’s highly represented in how we approach…even product photography,” says Moore. “We always want the human element visible, even if it’s a hand holding it.”
The company plans to continue with its cadence of updates over the next year, with a particular focus on revamping the experience for sellers on the platform. But when considering the scale of the work at play, I wonder, what are the metrics Ebay cares most about? Is it engagement? Amount spent per transaction?
“When you boil it down, it’s growth—growth for the younger generations: millennials and Gen Z,” says Moore. “And we’re seeing that signal across the board.”