Ebay Motors Updates Look, Improves Usability

Â
old vs. new

As one who is currently car shopping (mine’s 12 years old) I’ve been checking out the Ebay Motors new design tonight, which is being shown to a few Ebay Users. Ebay has spent a lot of time making the new Ebay Motors site airy and much less cluttered. When I look at the old interface now, it appears positively drab. The new color scheme is cheerful and less like a machine shop, something I doubt resonated well with many of eBay’s female shoppers.

When searching for the car, a much improved search and drill down interface has been developed, based on tabular pages. Tabs appear for the search page and the automotive details page. Purists may hate having to click from tab to tab, but the groupings seem well thought out, and the clutter is removed. The new filtering tool lets you add or remove criteria with a mouse click and is very intuitive. You can view “recent” sales with one click, rather than trying to set up a “completed” items search and fumbling around on your own. Price research is compiled for you as well, showing the past few sales and what comparable cars have sold for.

When you‘re looking at an individual car, you get another tabbed interface. The old screen was long (left) and wasted a great deal of screen real estate, but the new one (right) uses pixels much more efficiently. Ebay has left room for more tabs, and I’m sure they’ll find a way to entice sellers to add more car details, such as video, in short order.

So I expect that Ebay users will like the new layout, and we may well see the remainder of Ebay get a revamp in the near future. It certainly is easier to use now – I just wish paying for a new car was as easy.