Goals of the Research
We wanted to learn specifically how Gen Z and Millennials browse, since they control the future market and dominate the purchasing power.
What is the Landing Experience?
We wanted to confirm how people actually enter landing pages and what their expectations were. Did they enter from Google? Social media?
Since the research was more foundational in nature, we were focused on understanding and uncovering needs instead of evaluating designs. As a result, we chose to use a diary study as the methodology. It allowed us to observe participants in-situ, with less bias, as they naturally browsed for items over the course of a week.
Findings of the Research:
Mindset of a Buyer When Browsing
Buyers are in a non-directed, fun mindset when browsing online. We should offer designs on a landing page that inspire further browsing and let a customer enjoy the breadth of eBay’s inventory through featured, similar, and related items. Since customers don’t have clear goals when browsing, they are very open to continue shopping.
Overall, the journey map of a customer we uncovered looked like this:
The 6 phases include social influence, casual exploration, the rabbit hole, evaluation options, and the final purchase. We will focus on the 3 most important phases which are social influence sparking inspiration, casual exploration building preferences, and the rabbit hole diverging interests.
Social Influence Sparks Inspiration
All of Gen Z and younger Millennials primarily get inspired by social media to look for products, while Older Millennials (late 30s) primarily get inspired by suggestions from friends. People consult social media (IG, TikTok), targeted promotions (60% off all clothing), and friends to get influenced to buy products.
Either participants are looking for a time killer, or get prompted by a real need
Casual Exploration
Buyers will open multiple tabs, and start seeing what catches their eye, to build their preferences. Then they will compare prices and styles across more than one site. This phase is all about looking at a variety of styles to start understanding what buyers want to get. The ideas that buyers have in mind when browsing are very specific, and they expect retail sites to match this.
Previous research heavily supports that people use retail sites as a tool to find their style and preferences.
The Rabbit Hole
People come to sites with an intent in mind, but may be curious of other products, so they will travel down a different route to find something new and unexpected. These are called rabbit holes, which allow for divergence of interests, as buyers just start browsing for other relevant items. As this behavior is what people engage in after landing on a retail site, this research highly supports that landing pages should be springboards, showing a diversity of content that can incentivize “rabbit-holing”.
The Browse team actually started using phrases like “rabbit holes” and “casual exploration” after this research study, highlighting its impact on the company’s thinking and strategy towards its Browse product. They valued this user research to give them a picture into the journey of a user, and it was the first in house work done to lay the foundation of understanding our customer.
This is what the sporadic and scattered shopping journey a browsing customer looks like.
What are some entry points in retail sites to rabbit holes? One is broader/related categories, as people are open to browsing more, and shop around if they like the inventory on the site. Another entry point is “items like this” modules, because if buyers can’t find exactly what they like, they will browse similar items modules at the bottom of the page. Lastly, buyers may enter rabbit holes through “featured/suggested for you” pages. When buyers are done browsing for an item, they may check a page’s suggested section for themselves.
Topline Findings
After presenting the research, we highlighted some top findings and next steps for Product and Design to work on. Firstly, we needed to design landing pages to be more entertaining, and match the intent of a user coming into our experience. We also need to develop experiences (like “recommended’, “similar items”) that allow for traveling down rabbit holes, to find related, relevant interests in a browsing journey. As well, since people enter retail sites through social media (especially Gen Z) in addition to Google, we should include social media in eBay’s ad strategy.
Next Steps
Based on these findings, we identified the key opportunities for landing pages. We discussed (1) highlighting related categories to enable more seamless rabbit hole experiences (like related item shopping). (2) We also wanted to allow for saving/favoriting any items on any browse page, as this is a key action users take at all phases of the browsing journey. (3) The last recommendation to include social media in eBay’s ad strategy is more high level and to be done in the future.
Our cross functional partners in product were highly impressed with our work, and we held several workshops after to start working on designs, following the first 2 key recommendations we had to enable rabbit holes and save items of choice. As well, we were able to present this work to eBay leadership, who were excited to break down silos with this new foundational research. Next steps include designing a new era of landing pages for eBay.
Impact of the Research
Since this was the first user research conducted for the Browse team and sought foundational answers, the results were valuable to understand the fundamental shopping behavior of browsing shoppers. Moving forward, research indicates we should match user expectations with fun, engaging content that invites users to explore.
In the following years, product partners at eBay referenced this document to better understand their buyers, and revisit the document frequently to learn more about browsing behavior.