eBay welcomes members to new on-site “neighborhoods”
EBay Neighborhoods has rolled out as the latest in a series of new tools and features to be introduced by eBay over the past few weeks. Neighborhoods, a collection of dedicated communities on eBay organized around common interests, offer Neighborhood members the ability to interact via tools such as message boards and to upload and share photos.
The Neighborhoods also draw from existing community content such as eBay listings, blogs and reviews. The official launch of Neighborhoods counted more than 600 dedicated communities already up on the site, representing such diverse interests as Battlestar Galactica and Weddings.
Though granting that Neighborhoods uses some social networking tools, an eBay spokesman said eBay doesn’t consider the Neighborhoods to be stand-alone social networks. “It’s just an extension of what our community members have been doing on eBay since it began: connecting with each other through commerce,” he says.
Neighborhoods grew out of an initiative by eBay to improve buyers’ experiences on the site, he adds, something that also stands to help eBay sellers. “We came to the conclusion that our buyer experience hadn’t really kept up to what people’s expectations were,” he says. “And if we can have buyers more engaged on the site, that certainly brings a benefit to the sellers as well.”
Other new features introduced by eBay recently as part of the same initiative include improved site search, a new home page, and Best Match, a sorting option that automatically chooses the most likely “best match” from broad search results. New features still in the works include One Click Bid, designed to boost the chances of winning an auction in the last 15 minutes by allowing buyers to bid and confirm with a single click from a View Item page.
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