Setify, an eBay in-house startup product

Challenge

Re-engage eBay's core collector audience through a brand new product that engages them in an authentic way and drives meaningful purchase activity on the eBay platform

Outcome

Launched Setify, an eBay in-house startup product to a pilot group of users enabling them to manage their collections online and check their inventory against authentic set checklists

My Role

Sole designer on a startup-style in-house team from project kickoff to product launch five months later

The opportunity

eBay's innovation team wanted to create a brand new startup product for their original audience, the collector. While the marketplace gave collectors the ability to acquire items, there was a larger opportunity to build something that went beyond the purchase alone, benefitting both eBay and the collector simultaneously.

While eBay's origins began with the collector community, the marketplace as we know it today grew exponentially across customer segments, industry verticals, and globally. That coupled with the rise of startups who were able to operate in much leaner environments while shipping product at a faster pace presented a project opportunity that could tackle two problems at once. How might the eBay innovation team create a brand new in-house startup product that re-engaged eBay's original collector community while demonstrating the ability to pivot on existing product development processes and embrace the startup's lean approach to launching customer experiences.

Working with executive stakeholders across design, product, and engineering, we explored a range of concepts before landing on the insight that inspired Setify: Collectors more often than not work backward from authentic sets that dictate what they collect in order to complete their collection. Whether they're restoring a '67 Corvette Stingray using vintage auto parts or completing their collection of the original House of M comic series, the authentic set is the common thread throughout all collecting activities.

Setify let collectors search for what they were collecting, view the authentic complete set, manage their collection against it like a checklist, and jump directly to eBay listings for missing or upgradeable items.

The experience was built around the collector's mental model, leveraging the authentic set as the key thread. Setify provides the platform for collectors to log in using their eBay credentials, search for the authentic sets they're collecting against, tag what they own and/or want, see their tagged items dynamically show their collection within their profile, and get links to eBay marketplace listings for missing items from their collection or items they want to upgrade.

We partnered with a third party agency to create a video that helped educate collectors on what Setify was and the value it brought beyond marketplace activity alone. Ultimately, this product represented the partnership and value eBay saw in its collector audience.

We abandoned eBay's traditional product development process and ran like a startup. Achieving speed required that I not rely on static deliverables alone but instead, embrace a broader toolset.

Setify required a different kind of process and the traditional eBay approach, which I was accustomed to, wasn't going to give us the kind of speed we needed to launch within what was considered an acceptable timeline. Our team, working style, and overall environment were built to emulate a lean startup experience. A small team, faster time to decisions, and a willingness to move before everything was perfect.

As the sole designer, I adapted my approach significantly by learning lightweight HTML and CSS prototyping and using tools like JSFiddle to hand off designs within the form of coded components to my partners. Engineering bandwidth was limited due to the size of the team and that had an impact on what product prioritized and in what order. If I relied on static mocks alone, I'm not entirely sure how much of what I had envisioned would have been built. Note: the screenshot below is from JSFiddle and is not the production code.

Setify went live to a pilot group of real eBay users. Within the pilot period, collectors were building profiles, tagging items against authentic sets, and managing their collections on the platform.

Seeing real collectors use the product, not in a research session but in the wild, was the payoff. Users came in and immediately understood what Setify was for. They started building their online profiles, tagging items in the authentic set pages, and managing their collections in a way that made clear the product had resonated with something real in their behavior.

The press coverage from TechCrunch, PCMag, and others was a bonus, organic validation that the concept was interesting beyond just eBay's existing user base.