eBay is launching a new feature to help customers make repeat purchases for frequently needed items such as dog food. eBay CEO Devin Wenig announced the new feature today during a keynote address at the eBay Open seller conference in Las Vegas.
Wenig said every month, he buys food for his two dogs on eBay. Sadly, sometimes his dogs must get used to a different brand because he can’t easily make a repeat purchase, but that’s about to change, he said.
“We want to drive frequency,” he told the 1,500 sellers in attendance. “We want consumers to come back to eBay. One of the most frustrating things that sometimes I hear from consumers is, “I love eBay, I love it. I use it once every two years.”
“It’s not always easy to buy an item month after month after month. We haven’t made it easy. Because you have to go into My eBay and find the item, and maybe the seller’s not selling that item again. Like the simple act of buying the same dog food – my poor dogs might have to get different dog food every month, ’cause we don’t make buying that same item easy.”
Wenig said eBay would be launching “Buy Again” very soon. For consumers like him, finding and buying regularly purchased items “is as simple as hitting “Buy It Again.” That drives velocity, that’ll drive sales for you.”
The CEO also announced changes to search. “We’ll be introducing for buyers a whole new way to filter, a whole new way to search, a whole new way to find your item.”
He used an example of a customer searching for a white wedding dress or a champagne wedding dress, “and that might be the same dress they’re looking for.”
“Richness, and the ability for them to sort and filter leads to velocity.”
Wenig said sellers will be eBay’s partners in the enhanced search feature, aided by a new flow eBay is launching today, “to make it easier than ever for you to contribute richness on your products and listings.”
“We know for a fact, when your listings have more descriptions, they sell better. Indisputable,” he said. And eBay wants to make it easy for sellers.
Wenig announced additional features and tools for sellers during his keynote address, some of which are covered in today’s Newsflash story.
Buy Again feature? Wow, that’s what everyone has been waiting for?! LOL. Enhanced search? Knowing this is eBay it means that search is about to become much much worse with eBay in further control of what gets shows to buyers and what sells. Filtering doesn’t matter on eBay when they’re still manipulating results. More smokescreens. What’s next?…..
to bad the weasel refuses to actually fix the search instead of adding more garbage to the search.
at least the delusional ceo admits that he is stupid by not knowing what kind of dog food we wants.
Actually I thought that already exists. Just go to your purchases section and click on the item you bought. Seems like a waste of programmer resources to me that could be used on fixes.