It has been a while since my last eBay-related post, but this article crossed my news feed a few days ago, and I had to comment:

AuctionBytes: Shopping.com Merchants Can Opt to Post on eBay Express

Time moves fairly quickly on the web, and at this point, the last of the strategic features from our 2007 plan for eBay Express are rolling out to the site. It’s exciting to see Lara & the team bring them to life after months & months of planning & effort.

The AuctionBytes article is fairly understated, but I think it’s worth highlighting a bit of what is now possible on eBay Express:

1. For the first time, buyers have one site where they can search & purchase, in one seamless experience, items from eBay.com, eBay Stores, Half.com, and Shopping.com. This is with 24×7 customer service, PayPal-based checkout, and 100% buyer protection.
2. Robust Merchandising Platform. eBay Express is now delivering targeted, customizable, and in many cases, product-based merchandising through email and the site. It began with the new “Add to Cart” page that launched a few months ago, and has now been extended across the site and to regular emails to recurring buyers. More importantly, it’s a flexible platform that allows for experimentation and optimization based on the actual results the team sees from different merchandising techniques and different types of placements.

Hopefully, the eBay Express experience will deliver these in such a way that they will feel seamless and obvious to buyers. The goal is to never reveal the complexity of integrating three completely separate platforms for fixed-price items to buyers.

One last thing that is wonderful to see is the amount of experimentation that is going on with the site, as the team works to relentlessly improve buyer engagement and purchasing rates. Many people might not notice the improvements to the results set, the navigation controls on finding pages, the shopping cart presentation, eBay.com integration, and the catalog-based experience in the media categories, but I see them now live-to-site, and I know that each and every one of those small feature improvements makes the experience measurably better.

So congratulations again to the team on these feature launches. I think I may make a couple extra purchases today on the site just to celebrate.