Over the past several weeks, eBay teams relaunched on-site eBay Community platforms in a dozen countries, giving Community pages a new look and a lot of new functionality. It’s all part of an international effort to revitalize the platform and find new ways for customers to engage with eBay and with each other.
“The Community is where our customers come to get information about buying and selling on eBay, to talk about the products they’re interested in and just to reconnect with friends,” said Jeff Terrell, the Director of Community for eBay North America. “The relaunched platform is making that experience more welcoming, more connected, and definitely more useful. In just the first week, we saw double-digit growth in the number of visitors and the number of posts and topics started by the Community Members.”
In addition to a cleaner and more visual design, the new platform encourages interactivity through features like the Ask A Question box that makes searching for information easier than ever; a new “kudos” button that lets members recognize each other for posting great content; and an Accepted Solution tag that surfaces best answers to members’ questions.
“The Community has built a rich database of information on the platform, but that information wasn’t always easy to navigate,” Jeff noted. “The Ask A Question feature uses an intuitive search to see if a similar question to yours has already been asked and answered. If the answer isn’t there, the user can post the question and get automatic notifications when answers come in.”
Globally, the Community teams from North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific relaunched 14 versions of the new platform. Jeff pointed out that these new platforms are just the first part of a multi-phase rollout. The team has plans to enhance the design and layout even further, to introduce featured blogs from eBay staff and other experts and to add some gamification elements to keep members active on the platform.
“Before we made these initial changes, we listened to the Community through focus groups, workshops, and interviews,” Jeff said. “They told us what they liked and what they felt needed to be changed. Their input is going to continue to be a part of every decision we make.”
The New eBay Communities:
United States – http://community.ebay.com
Canada (English) – http://community.ebay.ca
Canada (French) – http://community.cafr.ebay.ca
UK – http://community.ebay.co.uk
France – http://communaute.ebay.fr
Germany – http://community.ebay.de
Italy – http://community.ebay.it
Spain – http://comunidad.ebay.es
Belgium (French) – http://community-befr.ebay.be
Belgium (Dutch) – http://community-benl.ebay.be
Netherlands – http://community.ebay.nl
Poland – http://community.ebay.pl
Australia – http://community.ebay.com.au
India – http://community.ebay.in
Special Thanks:
A lot of eBay employees helped get the Communities relaunched, including Rachel Makool in the US, Ronan Gillen and EU team, Melvin Bunag in Canada, the Australia Community team, and Deepanvita Gupta in India. Leaders Rachel Makool and Jeff Terrell are shown in the photo above.