The eBay Shop your Interests feature, or Interests for short, has launched. It’s a new feature that tailors the shopping experience based on expressed passions, hobbies and style. The result is a more personalised eBay that uses technology to curate all the many millions of items on eBay exclusively for each shopper.
On the app you start by answering a few questions about your interests and those are then matched with browsing patterns and habits. The result will be unique homepage and offering from eBay honed to your behaviours and responses. You can read the announcement here.
Our shopping experience should be as individual as each shopper on eBay. By asking people to tell us a little bit about their interests, we’re delivering a personalized store built around the things you care about most.
– Bradford Shellhammer, Head of Browse & Personalization for eBay
Interests is currently only available on eBay’s mobile app in the USA for iOS and Android. In the coming months, it will be rolling out to new platforms, including mobile-web and desktop, as well as eBay’s other international markets around the world.
The question is whether there is any major interest in such features from eBay shoppers and whether eBay can effectively pull off the curated content thing. Do shoppers have the inclination to answer questions and provide the information eBay wants? We’re sceptical.
And this sounds very much like a simple reinvention of the Collections idea that eBay launched a few years back in their last foray into content curation and it’s difficult to assess whether that made any great impact. Perhaps that they are trying again at something similar suggests it was successful at engaging buyers.
What is, perhaps, more interesting about this new feature launch is that Interests is coming out first in the app suggesting a greater adherence to a ‘mobile first’ approach.
