eBay Price Guide

A trading card price tracking tool, leveraging data to build customer confidence.

Project Overview
Have you ever wondered how much your old Pokemon cards are worth?
I designed a scalable 0>1 experience that allows customers to view real-time market values of their trading cards on eBay for the first time.
ROLE
Product design lead working directly with UX Researcher, Product Manager, and Engineering team.
TIMELINE
2022 - 2023 including initial launch and iterations.
OUTCOMES
- 4x yearly revenue goal
- 40% Retention
- 500k> unique users
Problem Space
eBay is the world's biggest trading card marketplace with over $4 billion in annual trading card sales. However, people couldn't find the value of trading cards on eBay. This led to two problems:
1. Customer Problem
Customers didn't know how much their trading cards were worth on eBay. This led users to search for an "estimate" by digging through past eBay transactions, or by migrating to the competition.
2. Business problem
Competitors were integrating eBay sales data into their own marketplaces, and presenting in a much more digestible way to attract customers away from eBay.
Existing user workaround
Project Goal
We needed to provide customers reliable and accurate values for their trading cards on eBay. By presenting this data in a transparent and actionable way we're building trust by pulling back the curtain and allowing customers to buy and sell with confidence.

This will, in turn, lead to an increase in revenue and retention.
Initial user research
Since this was uncharted territory for the company, we began with user research to understand our customers and how to best approach designing this new tool.

I created three basic concepts to test with customers and get a better understanding of task flows, user goals, existing workarounds, all to form a strong base of knowledge of our customers.
Key insights from research
We kicked off the project with a user research study testing high-level concepts. Here's what we learned:
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Specific workflows
Customers relied on a search-based workflow, suggesting that our feature had to fit into their mental model.
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Customers search iteratively
Pricing data is only helpful when searches become specific, so the tool needs to be configurable.
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Volatile market
Understanding trending prices is important as card prices fluctuate rapidly.
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Untrustworthy data
eBay data perceived as untrustworthy because of "fake listings" and miscategorized items.
Personsas
Flipper
Higher number of low value cards. Looks to make profit and likes to trade quickly and often.
Enthusiast
May have high or low value cards. Driven by a desire to purchase cards that fuel a feeling or completion or nostalgia.
Investor
Deals with mostly high value cards. Willing to hold onto cards for a long time to make the most profit.
Personsas
Flipper
Higher number of low value cards. Looks to make profit and likes to trade quickly and often.
Enthusiast
May have high or low value cards. Driven by a desire to purchase cards that fuel a feeling or completion or nostalgia.
Investor
Deals with mostly high value cards. Willing to hold onto cards for a long time to make the most profit.
A closer look at end point of broken UX
A piece of the journey
At the time, our team was building out an entire Collectibles-based ecosystem of products. Therefore, it was important to stay grounded in the entire customer journey, taking into account real world actions and motivations, and other eBay touchpoints while building out the Price Guide.

I did this by staying in constant communication with my design colleagues, and frequently sharing out work to stay in sync. Also, I created artifacts like the Golden Path user journey below were useful in staying aligned in design and review.
Debrief
Our team had a debriefing session after launch. Team members expressed frustration over shifting executive priorities and technical issues being discovered late during the design process. This led to frustrating churn between design, engineering, and product teams.
Ultimately, we were able to get support for improving the experience after the Beta was launched. This is a credit in particular to my product partner who really championed our cause with senior product leadership.
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