Thinking Mobile-First: Driving eBay Payments Adoption
How eBay is modernizing its marketplace and simplifying payments for customers
By: Nidhi Gupta
Throughout the last 25 years, eBay has been focused on making it easier for our customers to buy and sell on our marketplace. Now that we’re managing the entire end-to-end payments experience, we provide sellers with one place to sell and get paid, and buyers with new, locally relevant payment options. As well, we’ve taking huge steps to modernize the marketplace and simplify payments at eBay.
We started transitioning our sellers over to our new payments experience in 2018. In Q1 2021, we processed 52% of global on-platform volume and completed nearly 80% of payments migration in the US. We’re excited that we’ll manage payments for the majority of the marketplace by the end of 2021.
As we work to make these enhancements, it’s crucial that we understand our customers by looking at market data and seller feedback. These two sources act as our north star, enabling us to better understand how to improve customer experience — which is why we’ve optimized payments for mobile.
While both business and casual sellers use mobile, it is often the primary platform for casual sellers who don’t need to use as many desktop tools to manage their eBay transactions. Using seller behavior data, we’ve gained better insight into how sellers use eBay’s marketplace, which guides our product and business strategy. Using data, we learned to focus on optimizing eBay managed payments for mobile users. Data helped us target seller education materials, drive registration, and create smooth customer experiences.
Driving seller adoption of eBay payments
We have been “mobile-minded” in every aspect of driving seller registration for eBay managing payments, including in our marketing efforts.
We’re mindful of sellers who read emails on their phones, tailoring our messages to be clear, short, and engaging. We also always ensure our font and text color are legible — especially in dark mode. We’ve made a concentrated effort in this area since we know that a staggering 85% of consumers open emails on their smartphones.[1] This effort does not go unnoticed by our customers. The average open rate and click-through rate of our payments emails perform above benchmarked rates for similar emails sent by other companies in the retail and ecommerce industry.[2]
When sellers click on these acquisition emails, they are directed to dynamic landing pages, before continuing on to our payments registration flow. Since we know many of our sellers see these pages on their phones, we’ve optimized them for mobile by presenting information in a strategic way. By determining which takeaways are the most critical to present first, and what we can place behind a click, we’re able to progressively disclose information to sellers relevant to them, as guided by our extensive user research efforts.
In the same vein, as we looked at the data throughout the seller onboarding journey, we’ve implemented push notification campaigns and added in-app product banners to prompt sellers to complete the registration and verification process. Since our goal is to get sellers to finish registering for eBay to manage their payments, we give them actionable instructions in this push notification to get “unstuck” and complete the journey. In a recent data pull, we found that 78% of the sellers who clicked on the push notification completed registration. Similarly, we’ve successfully tested using SMS campaigns to aid sellers in completing verification of their data. This extra nudge makes a big difference and helps draw customer attention to these important steps they can take to continue their selling activity on eBay unhindered.
Frictionless onboarding flows and a more streamlined day-to-day
To make onboarding onto eBay payments easier, our mobile experience is intuitive and helpful. As sellers might fill out these forms on their phones, their existing information on file is prefilled so they don’t have to re-enter data. They can quickly verify existing details and link their bank accounts from their phones, with helpful tips to explain why we’re asking for this information. In some notable results, we found that as many as 59% of our casual sellers registered for eBay managed payments from mobile — with 27% using the eBay app and 32% registering on mobile web.
After ensuring sellers successfully onboard, we work to optimize their mobile interactions on our marketplace. One of the most important benefits of eBay managing payments is that sellers no longer need to have a relationship with a third-party payments processor to sell on eBay. Now they can manage all of their activities, including payments, from one account on eBay. What’s more, sellers can also do almost everything from their phones, with 71% of our casual sellers using it as their platform of choice to access the eBay marketplace. What’s more, many of our business sellers have also demonstrated a preference for mobile experiences with more than half using eBay’s mobile app as their frequent platform of choice.
Our mobile interface displays seller payout information in a targeted and easy-to-understand way, enabling visibility into where the seller’s funds are. This transparent approach has made it really easy for sellers to understand and track payouts. Similarly, we send push notifications to sellers when a buyer pays for an item so the seller knows when they may expect their payouts.
Managing payments also enables us to offer more ways for buyers to pay on eBay. For example, buyers can now make purchases using Apple Pay and Google Pay — and almost half of buyers using Apple Pay or Google Pay are new to eBay.[3] This data echoes industry trends. According to an analytics report from Mordor Intelligence, the use of mobile payments is set to continue its unstoppable growth at a compound annual growth rate of 24.5% between 2021–2026.[4]
By keeping an eye on our customers and how they prefer to use eBay, we’re gaining valuable insights to help better enhance our marketplace for both buyers and sellers.
Forging a path into the future
As we continue to move forward, our primary goal is to stay committed to optimizing payments for our customers. Since we want to act as a trusted partner to buyers and sellers, we’ll remain focused on continually auditing and improving the payments experience, especially for mobile. That’s why seller input is so crucial in our eyes — we’re regularly turning to our customers to help us determine what we should build out next or how to further enhance our current experience.
We’re happy to report that sellers enjoy the new way to do business on eBay. As we’ve transitioned sellers to eBay managing their payments, we’ve used Advocacy (Net Promoter) and Satisfaction scores to measure their sentiment and we continue to track seller feedback and improvement in satisfaction. This response is also promising since exiting Q1 2020 with over 4 million sellers migrated globally.
As eBay works towards managing payments for the majority of eBay sellers this year, our goal is to continue enhancing features that make the experience even more seamless for buyers and sellers around the world. We will continue to iterate and improve our payments experience based on what we learn from research metrics and customer feedback gathered from surveys, customer support, the eBay Community, and other seller channels. We look forward to discovering new and exciting ways to enhance the entire journey to make eBay the platform of choice for buyers and sellers.
[1] Data based on 2018 Adobe Consumer Email Survey. The report surveyed more than 1,000 white-collar workers in the United States who own a smartphone. Survey results available here: https://www.slideshare.net/adobe/2018-adobe-consumer-email-survey
[2] Data based on the 2019 Marketing Benchmark Report published by Acoustic, L.P. This study analyzed emails deployed during 2018 by clients of Acoustic, L.P. using Acoustic marketing solutions. Report available here: https://www.acoustic.com/reports/marketing-benchmark-report
[3] Based on purchasing behavior of new and reactivated buyers during the quarter ending September 30, 2020. New buyers include customers that made their first purchase on eBay in the preceding 52-week period or returned to make a purchase on eBay after no activity for 12 consecutive months.
[4] Mobile Payments Market — Growth, Trends, Covid-19 Impact, and Forecasts (2021–2026), Market Overview, Modor Intelligence, available at: https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/mobile-payment-market
