eBay • My Garage
A custom shopping experience driving 20x average daily sales
Buying the wrong part or not having all the right parts to complete a repair is a common headache for both auto enthusiasts and professional mechanics. According to eBay Motors’ Automotive study in 2016, nearly half of consumers (49 percent) have mistakenly purchased a part either online or in store, that was incompatible with their vehicle. Additionally, more than 70 percent started a car repair before realizing they didn’t have all the right parts to finish the job. To address this, eBay built algorithms that connect its catalog of over 80 million parts and accessories to its fitment data. I led the effort to design a simplified shopping process powered by this new fitment system.
Developing solutions to simplify the shopping experience, powered by fitment compatibility
I led workshops and interviews with auto parts customers to understand the challenge and frustration of shopping for parts on eBay. I also conducted audits of contemporary online parts shopping experiences to understand how fitment data was used to show compatibility with shoppers’ vehicles. To ensure eBay shoppers would not buy the wrong part, I developed an end-to-end solution in the form of wireframes and user flows that would show shoppers only items that would fit their vehicle.
Workshops with stakeholders and design team partners resulted in a plethora of ideas around customization and personalization.
User flow exploration of entry from the eBay Home Page and switching between saved vehicles.
Designing a custom storefront experience
At the heart of this simplified experience would be a page centered around the customer's vehicle. When a vehicle is saved to ebay, the key information of the vehicle can be used to filter out non-relevant items and indicate compatibility. The storefront would be the starting point, and fitment would follow them through the purchase process.
Early exploration of the structure and priority of shopping tools for the custom storefront.
Early low-fidelity sketches emphasized browsing parts by category.
Applying the fitment compatibility system to the core shopping experience
For the custom storefront to be useful, every shopping path that starts from the Garage needed to apply the vehicle information to provide relevancy, so that search results showed only compatible items, and the item detail pages indicated whether the part fits or not. I worked closely with the various partner teams for the core shopping experience to make sure the fitment data was properly integrated into each key step of the customer journey.
It is very easy for a shopper to add a vehicle to their garage and switch between vehicles as they shop across eBay
It is very easy for a shopper to add a vehicle to their garage and switch between vehicles as they shop across eBay
The fitment system lets the shopper know that their search or browse is filtered to show only parts that fit their selected vehicle
Conclusion
The updated My Garage experience offers a custom storefront for every auto shopper. By saving the details of their cars, trucks and motorcycles including year, make, model, trim level and engine type to the “My Garage” destination, shoppers get streamlined access to the parts specific to their vehicle. When a shopper searches for any item, eBay will only show items that fit the vehicles in their virtual garage.
The Garage experience is designed to work across platforms, from Desktop to tablet to phone.
More than half of all U.S. adults have tackled some sort of auto repair by themselves, and not knowing exactly which part they need can be one of the biggest obstacles to online parts shopping. The new features … eliminate the guesswork by helping people find and buy the specific part they need – even if they don’t know exactly what it is.
- Jay Hanson, COO/VP eBay Americas
