eBay Gets a Pinterest Style Facelift in Southeast Asia

Following the revamp of eBay’s US site in late October last year, eBay Singapore has officially announced today that it has also rolled out a brand new interface which claims to provide a more visually inspiring and innovative shopping experience to users.

The new look is currently only in Malaysia, Singapore and Philippines as part of their initiative to roll out the interface across Southeast Asia. eBay users in other parts of the region such as Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam could expect the interface switch by the end of the year  soon. (Edit: According to the eBay’s PR, no date has been confirmed yet.)

Part of the revamp enables local users to get better access to global sellers which ships directly to their home country. eBay has revealed that through this introduction, there are now 40 million more listings from global sellers that ship directly to Singapore, in addition to the current pool of local sellers.

There is also a new feature called the Feed (refer to video below), which bears a striking resemblance to Pinterest’s iconic image grid interface with infinite scrolling. Users are able to furnish their feed by entering their interests into the system, and have a personalized homepage feed of curated products which are ‘instantly shoppable’. While giving the new feature a test, I chanced upon several repeated products listed side by side (as seen in image below) as well as inconsistent product images which made browsing not exactly visually appealing. eBay remarked that they will be working with the local retailers in educating them to make use of their larger product image canvases and better product descriptions.

To date, 60 percent of eBay’s revenue is derived from regions outside of the United States, with over 116 million active users, 25 million sellers and 400 million listings worldwide. However, there are no figures pertaining specifically to Asia released to the media.