Design and development of a portal for sellers
eBay Export

Client

eBay is an American company, one of the largest international online marketplaces that brings together millions of sellers and buyers from all over the world.

We cooperate with the company's Moscow office, which is responsible for Russia, Eastern Europe, Africa and Latin America.

eBay не растёт в одиночку —
он развивается вместе со своими
пользователями.

Оказывая всестороннюю поддержку,
в том числе информационную, компания помогает продавцам развивать их бизнес. Ведь от успеха продавцов зависит и успех eBay.

Problem

It is not always easy for novice sellers to figure out the nuances of the marketplace on their own.

And the conditions for doing business in Russia, Eastern Europe, Africa and Latin America are full of their own specifics – everything differs from country to country in each region. Therefore, it became necessary to create a resource that would help sellers from these countries successfully sell on eBay.

Solution

First, we created a simple website and laid out several articles adapted for the required regions for it.

Over the past two years, a huge amount of content has accumulated on the site.

eBay is developing as a platform, new topics are emerging in different areas: logistics, placement and advertising, customer relations, fees.

Over the past two years, a huge amount of content has accumulated on the site.

eBay is developing as a platform, new topics are emerging in different areas: logistics, placement and advertising, customer relations, fees.

In addition, eBay is constantly opening up new opportunities for sellers.

For instance, due to the Coronavirus pandemic, the company has introduced various mechanisms to support and protect sellers. Out of all this, novice sellers need to know one thing, and experienced sellers need to know another.

It became clear that it was impossible to organise so much content on the original portal,

therefore, we reworked its structure and made a redesign in order to:
— take into account all the needs of the portal users;
— support the introduction of the new brand guidelines.

Stages of work

Development

For convenient and easy portal management and creating new pages, we made a website using the builder on Wagtail CMS. It is a block-based editor in which you can select, combine and determine the order of the blocks of the future portal page, as well as customise field values and other options.

Technologies

With the new version of the portal, we have changed the underlying technology stack. The project has become easier to maintain, and the portal has become more technologically advanced and faster.

Design

The first version was released at the start of the project in 2018, and the second – two years later, when eBay has got new brand guidelines. At first, there were three colour schemes: green, blue, and yellow. Each of them could use a set of over 30 content blocks.

Design 2020

The current brand guidelines contain a huge number of palettes, but we used only some of them for the portal.

As a result, we have got three new colour schemes:

At the same time, the nomenclature of the blocks has not changed, but several new ones have been added.

Each block is available in all colour schemes.

Language versions

The portal is localised into five different languages: Russian, English, Español, Português и עִברִית.

Hebrew is worth mentioning separately:

The direction of writing in this language is from right to left, so we needed to make everything on the portal adapt without problems.

It was not easy – our operating systems went crazy when we wrote from right to left in one window and from left to right in the other. But we did it.

Content

eBay Export is primarily an educational content portal that aims to help the eBay seller community at all stages of their interaction with the eBay platform.

In the news section, sellers can find an industry agenda about anything that could affect their business.

New materials are published several times a month.

There is a content plan for reference sections, and the news block is updated according to the market and global situation.

New materials are published several times a month.

There is a content plan for reference sections, and the news block is updated according to the market and global situation.

The texts are prepared by our partners - the Textarium content agency.

Landing pages

In addition to the development, design and support of the portal, we also make landing pages for promo campaigns – we tell eBay users about special offers and give them the opportunity to take advantage of them.

Before the redesign, all landing pages were built manually. The new version of the portal allows you to put them together in the admin panel without involving developers.

An extended set of colour palettes is available for them, which do not depend on the primary colours of the portal.

Product team

Together with our client, we work as a single product team.

At our weekly growth hacking meetings, we generate hypotheses on how to increase the project's key metrics, quickly test them and evaluate the success of the experiments. All results are tracked using Google Analytics.

Results

The portal has been live for two years already. We are constantly working on it and setting new goals.

Current results:

the portal's audience has doubled over the past year.

100K

unique users per month.

Client’s testimonial

Maria Tyurina

marketing manager for sellers

The eBay Moscow office is responsible for the company's business in more than 200 countries across the world. For eBay sellers from the US, UK, Germany and several other countries, it is primarily important to develop domestic sales, and we focus on export sales online.

There is a lot of information for sellers on the global eBay sites but mostly related to domestic sales. When we were planning to create export.ebay.com our first task was to organise all available information on one portal to help sellers from our region successfully develop export sales worldwide.

As a result, with the JetStyle team, we went much further and not only systematised what we already had but also created new services and content for our sellers. The portal was highly appreciated not only by our sellers but also by the regional and global management of the company.

I highly appreciate our joint work with the team, not just because from an operational point of view everything works almost perfectly: the speed of updates, clear compliance with the tasks set, but also because I feel the sincere involvement of the entire JetStyle team in the project, — they understand the business objectives of eBay, offer solutions, show independence when working with my colleagues from other countries (there is a lot of work considering we are in different time zones), they are concerned about the design and external view of the site.

We have a lot of plans and ideas for the future to develop the portal, and with such a team, I am sure that we will succeed.

Partner's testimonial

Maria Bardashun

co-owner of Textarium content agency

Export.ebay.com is an ambitious and large-scale project. Previously, eBay sellers had to study various sources, including those in a foreign language, to find the information they needed. Now, in order to get answers to their questions, sellers from different regions just need to visit export.ebay.com.

Now our company puts together, analyses and explains in simple words all the most important instructions, news, updates for sellers, and the JetStyle team is responsible for visual design and content structuring.

From the very start of the project, we have been working closely: together, we put forward and test hypotheses, introduce new sections and services, experiment with content presentation formats and elements on the site. The JetStyle team offers optimal technical solutions even for the most difficult ideas to implement. The analytics provided by colleagues at JetStyle becomes the backbone of the content strategy and helps to continually improve the user experience for eBay sellers.