eBay fashion's virtual dressing room
So far, eBay has produced 14 mobile apps that let users buy, sell, and hunt for deals. Yankovich says he is aiming for a production pace of one app every five weeks. "We pick and choose what will move the needle, and then we do it fast," he says. Last year, for example, Yankovich and his team added the feature that alerts mobile shoppers as to the status of auctions. "Sales shot up," he says. "It was instant money." On June 23, eBay announced its acquisition of RedLaser, a mobile app that uses a cell phone's camera to scan bar codes.
John Donahoe, 50, eBay's chief executive officer since two years ago, says the company will roll out apps tailored to specific product categories. The first, eBay Fashion, will display popular items and deals in a slide show that users can browse through by swiping their finger on a touchscreen. The app will also offer a kind of virtual dressing room; if you find a shirt you like, for example, you can use your phone's camera to superimpose an image of the shirt on an image of you.
Such blending of real-world and virtual shopping could start a trend, says Yankee Group's Nick Holland. Amazon has an app that lets users snap a product's photo and see comparable items and prices online. (Amazon spokesman Craig Berman declined to comment.)
Yankovich says he's still discovering what works with shoppers. "Nobody knows what's going to happen in mobile," he says. "We need to be ready to spin on a dime."
The bottom line Mobile commerce is booming and still fragmented, so eBay is rapidly introducing shopping apps to stay ahead of Amazon, its main U.S. rival.
Douglas MacMillan is a staff writer for Bloomberg Businessweek in New York. Joseph Galante is a reporter for Bloomberg in San Francisco.
