Pulling From More Than 400M Listings, eBay’s Pinterest-Like, New Personalized Home Page Experience Rolls Out Tomorrow

Last October, eBay debuted a completely new homepage experience and redesign, marking the company’s biggest homepage in the marketplace’s history. eBay’s feed experience has been in pilot phase for several months, only tested with less than 10 percent of users, and tomorrow eBay is unveiling to new experience to all customers in the U.S. You can access the new homepage here.

eBay’s new homepage is essentially all about you. The homepage now includes a highly visual, personalized feed of products based on your interests, and the brands and trends that match their passions and preferences. For the feed, you can add your favorite interests (i.e. golf), brands and even trends. Using this data, eBay will show you new items, recent searches, and more. eBay is pulling from more than 400 million listings.

Tom Pinckney, head of the eBay NYC office and one of the co-founders of personalization startup Hunch, explains that the new homepage is not just about search, but also discovery and serendipity. “We are introducing a different type of shopping and inventing a new way to shop with product discovery,” he explains. “We have a huge map of date around discovery and serendipity and are trying to find ways to take this data and tap into collective intelligence.”

Another component of the new technology is real-time updates on product listings and changes. eBay will serve customers new items in their feed every time they visit the home page – and update them continually during their eBay sessions.

Based on results from the few test users since October, customers are responding positively, says Pinckney. Another are where eBay sees huge potential in data mining and product is helping users share knowledge about products and listings.

In the future, we’ll see the feed come to eBay’s mobile experience, but Pinckney says the newest development to come will be international rollout in the near future.

As we mentioned back in october, the feed has a striking similarity to Pinterest. But it’s not surprising that eBay is diving deep on providing a sleeker, more streamlined and visual experience. And with the enormous amount of data eBay has accumulated over the years, the company is delving into personalization and curation in a big way. We know this is the future of ecommerce, so it’s a wise bet. But how this affects the company’s top line remains to be seen.

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