eBay is overhauling its homepage again to personalize recommendations for each visitor

In late 2013, eBay unveiled a new homepage design meant to surface different goods based on the interests of each individual site visitor — but it required some work on the part of the shopper.

Three-plus years later, eBay wants a do-over — one that doesn’t require visitors to do anything but browse and shop like they always do.

The new design features horizontal image carousels stacked one on top of the other. Rows are organized by items you’ve recently viewed, items you’ve added to a list of products you are “watching” and rows set aside for products and eBay shops recommended for you by an eBay algorithm.

eBay

What you won’t see is a requirement for shoppers to “save” products or “follow” sellers that the last attempt at “personalization” necessitated.

“That was a lot to ask of a casual customer: To curate their own feed,” said Bradford Shellhammer, the one-time Fab.com co-founder who is now eBay’s head of personalization and engagement.

This latest attempt at personalization is built atop a recent initiative that organizes eBay’s vast catalogue of goods by product type rather than by individual listing. If you’re a close follower of eBay, this is what management has been referring to as its “structured data” initiative.

While recommendations and personalization seem like table stakes for a large e-commerce site today, it is absolutely crucial that eBay gets this right. That’s because the main advantages eBay has over everyone else — including Amazon — are rare items you can’t find anywhere else.

This differentiator for eBay is useless, however, if the right customer can’t easily find the right item for them — or have it appear in front of them serendipitously. Shellhammer said eBay is looking to Netflix as a model for personalization and recommendation done right. But close observers of e-commerce will see a resemblance between this layout and the one Amazon introduced two years ago, too.

The new design will spread to other parts of the website in the future. That’ll be key, because the majority of visits to eBay don’t start on the homepage. On Cyber Monday, for example, just 17 percent of visits in the U.S. started at the front door of the shopping site.

The desktop rollout of this redesign should reach all customers before the midway point of the year, while the mobile version will be fully launched by the end of 2017.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

Will you support Vox’s explanatory journalism?

Most news outlets make their money through advertising or subscriptions. But when it comes to what we’re trying to do at Vox, there are a couple reasons that we can't rely only on ads and subscriptions to keep the lights on.

First, advertising dollars go up and down with the economy. We often only know a few months out what our advertising revenue will be, which makes it hard to plan ahead.

Second, we’re not in the subscriptions business. Vox is here to help everyone understand the complex issues shaping the world — not just the people who can afford to pay for a subscription. We believe that’s an important part of building a more equal society. We can’t do that if we have a paywall.

That’s why we also turn to you, our readers, to help us keep Vox free. If you also believe that everyone deserves access to trusted high-quality information, will you make a gift to Vox today?

One-Time Monthly Annual

$5/month

$10/month

$25/month

$50/month

Other

$

Yes, I'll give $5/month

Yes, I'll give $5/month

We accept credit card, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. You can also contribute via