eBay's Holiday Gift: A New iPad App and Festive Good Deeds
As announced today, eBay has launched its first iPad app in a bid (if you will) to “enhance the shopping in time for the holidays,” according to a press release. The e-commerce platform is intent on reinvigorating growth and sales by catering to the more than half of its users (59%) who are multi-screen shoppers.
The immersive platform—available in 8 languages to buyers and sellers around the globe—enhances the brand's content marketing efforts and features an elevated design aesthetic.
The app features a simplified navigation and checkout, gesture-based exploration, a refined photography gallery, a more user-friendly "My eBay" experience (Buying, Selling, Watching, Following), new item detail (View Item) and seller profile pages and fresh collections across popular categories (Motors, Fashion, Electronics, and Collectibles).
According to Re/code, the new app comes as eBay’s marketplace business continues to contract. Marketplace revenue growth decelerated to six percent year over year in the third quarter, down from nine percent in the second quarter and 11 percent in the first quarter. Plus, the company was hit with a double whammy earlier this year: A hack of shopper information and a penalty by Google that knocked a chunk of its pages out of search results.
While it has some catching up to do, engaging its community (and new users) in a visually compelling tablet experience is certainly a step in the right direction.
This may explain why “we approached the development the new iPad app in a more agile way than ever before," as chief product officer RJ Pittman stated in the release. "We want to bring more improvements to our customers faster, and solicit their feedback early in the product lifecycle. We will use our customers’ feedback to improve the quality and pace of innovation at eBay."
