Alan Lewis

eBay for iPhone - Why It Almost Didn't Happen

eBay announced today that the sales through eBay mobile for 2010 hit 2 billion dollars, which translates to more than 200 million in revenue for the company. The majority of mobile activity comes from the eBay iPhone app, while the rest comes from the mobile website and apps on other platforms. eBay Mobile now represents one of the few bright spots for the company, but what is most amazing is that it almost didn't happen. 

eBay has had mobile apps and a mobile web version for years. As little as 3 years ago, all mobile app development involved testing applications on dozens of different phones and negotiating distribution deals with carriers. The eBay mobile app strategy back then was to partner with Bonfire Media -- they had already written an app and eBay helped get them additional distribution deals and then took a percentage of the revenue (users had to actually pay for the app). As for the mobile website, it was a WAP site, which is the same as saying that it sucked. Of course these hurdles were too much for most users, and the amount of purchases flowing through either the website or the apps were not enough for eBay to publicly disclose any numbers.

This all changed with the iPhone App Store. I was working in the "Disruptive Innovation" group at eBay, and when the App Store was announced that spring, I immediately applied for a developer license and was lucky enough to be in the first group of developers given access. As far as I could tell, no one else in the company had access yet, and I spent about 36 hours straight developing an eBay iPhone app prototype for an innovation content we were holding later that week. The app was just a prototype, but it did work - you could search all of eBay and browse your My eBay items, and because it used standard iOS components it looked great despite being thrown together in a very short time. The app impressed the judges and attendees when it was demoed at the innovation event - the iPhone SDK was so new that any custom app, let alone one that did something even modestly useful, was impressive. (One judge, Michael Arrington of Techcrunch, was so impessed that he actually approached me afterwards and proposed that we create a social networking app. We had set up a meeting, which he then cancelled after he saw a demo of Loopt, which had already built the app he wanted to build.)

I kept working improving the prototype in my spare time, and met with the eBay Mobile team to discuss how we could get a real version of the app built. The team had previously decided to not invest in building out an iPhone app, and to instead focus on improving the mobile version of the website. Luckily, one of the product managers on the team, Ken Sun, did take the opportunity seriously and he took responbility for getting a contact at Apple and finding others who could work on the project - all in our "spare time", of course. There was exactly 1 person in the whole of eBay who seemed to have any development experience with Objective C, Rick Hoiberg, and he was overjoyed to get a chance to work on coding the backend. But it was clear that we would need help especially with the frontend, and our contact at Apple got us in touch with Critical Path - the same company who has continued to develop the majority of the eBay iPhone app ever since then, and which was just acquired by eBay. 

With a small team of eBay employees and an outside development firm lined up, we had just weeks to create the application to get it done in time for the App Store launch. We were able to pull together an attractive, workable demo in time to get it demoed on stage at WWDC when the App Store was announced. (You can watch Ken and me demoing the app on stage).

The importance of this event can not, I think, be overstated. Every company that built apps that appeared in the keynote worked extremely hard, not just on the apps themselves but also preparing for the on-stage demos. And the companies that presented have all been treated well by Apple since, with spots in television commercials, ads promoting the app store, and placement within the app store itself. eBay could have taken a "wait and see" approach, as the eBay Mobile team had wanted to do, but it wouldn't have had the momentum that started from day 1 of the App Store launch, wouldn't have had the talent (Critical Path), which became extremely hard to come by after the success of the App Store became clear, and it may not have received as much free promotion from Apple. 

While the Mobile team did drag their feet, I do give them credit that they came around quickly, especially once they saw the early success (if I remember correctly, the eBay iPhone app accounted for over 20% of all mobile traffic within a week or two of the app's release). But the eBay executive team took far longer to come around. In late 2008, after I had left the company, most of the eBay Mobile team was laid off or re-assigned to other parts of the company. Executives wanted to focus on the "core" of the business, and eBay Mobile was evidently not considered "core". (I'll note that this information comes second-hand, but it does jive with my personal experience with the company and their lack of product vision and leadership.) Even the execs have come around though, and the team in charge of eBay Mobile has made some great moves, especially the Red Laser acquisition. But it is incredible to think about how the project could have never happened, or at least not have had the impact it did.

Alan Lewis Has Joined Auctiva

I am happy to report that I have recently joined Auctiva as their Platform Manager. Auctiva has been in the business of providing software and services for eBay sellers for a decade, and I'll be leading their new effort to build a platform that powers new services for sellers off-eBay.

Why join Auctiva? Here are just a few of the many reasons:

• I have known many of the people who work here for many years, and I really respect what they have accomplished in building the company to where it is.
• Auctiva has a vision for online commerce that I can get behind. If I ever get back on the blogging horse in a serious way I will have much more to say about this vision, but in brief, Auctiva is building a powerful platform that will enable many new, uniques way to connect buyers and sellers.
• The people who work here are humble, and are willing to admit mistakes and reverse course quickly. Auctiva was recently forced by eBay policy changes to start charging for some services that were previously free. The original pricing that we came up with was a mistake -- too complicated, and too costly for many sellers. So we changed it, and every indication from our users is that this time we have got it right. Of course you hope to get things right the first time as often as you can, but any company will make mistakes, and what one of the things that makes a company great is how it acts to recognize and fix those mistakes.
• Auctiva has a very flat organizational structure. At Auctiva I am reporting directly to CEO Jeff Schlicht (and most other people in the company are also no more than 2 or 3 levels removed). This contrasts with a previous employer where the CEO was (no exaggeration) my boss's boss's boss's boss's boss's boss.

Although my new role is focused on Auctiva's off-eBay projects, I will be working on some eBay projects as well. I will be attending eBay's developer conference this week (which is literally being held down the street from Auctiva's new San Jose office) and I look forward to catching up with my eBay developer community colleagues who I have met over the years. I'll be sporting my new bright blue Auctiva shirt, so give me a holler if  you see me.

eBay Desktop 1.0 is out. Whew.

I just pushed the 1.0 version of eBay Desktop live. You really should go get it. It is free, and it is the coolest thing since, well, ebay.com. And as if that weren't enough, I've started a new blog (because, you know, I'm so good at keeping my own blog up to date) over at http://desktop.ebay.com/blog. Subscribe to that in order to keep up to date with eBay Desktop related stuff. I promise to keep it to a minimum here from now on. Maybe.

I have been working on this along with my peeps at Effective UI since July of 2006, making this by far the longest project I've ever worked on.

FYI - I find my IT setup right now quite ridiculous. I'm in a hotel in San Francisco for the night so that I don't have to commute up at rush hour to get to the Adobe Engage event where I'm speaking. In order to push the files live to the server I'm connected over VPN to the eBay network, then I have to remote desktop into a server that is physically located within the eBay network and then from that server I connect to the file server in order to push the release live. All to send some 1s and 0s around.

-Alan

eBay Desktop Public Beta Now Available

The project formerly known as "San Dimas" is now available in public beta: eBay Desktop launches in public beta today. Anyone can download eBay Desktop for free.

eBay Desktop is, well, eBay on your desktop. You can use eBay Desktop instead of the website to search, browse, bid, watch items, read and write messages -- most everything that you use the eBay website for to buy stuff. eBay Desktop also goes beyond the web experience through features like desktop alerts (for when items are ending or when you get outbid) and favorite search feeds, which let you spot when items are listed that match one of your searches.

We've made a number of improvements since the private beta (besides changing the name, of course). The number one piece of feedback from users was "make it more about me." We took this to heart and have completely revamped the home screen to put more information about your eBay activity up front. We've made significant performance and memory-usage improvements, and more will be coming soon. The alerts feature now works even when the application window is closed -- eBay Desktop will optionally keep running in the background so that you can get notified when you are outbid.

Remember when it used to be possible to browse on eBay? Well we wanted to leverage the power of the desktop to make browsing on eBay workable again. On the home screen you can drill-down into the categories, all without refreshing.

My favorite new feature is search feeds. eBay has offered favorite searches for a long time, but unless you enjoy getting emails containing your favorite searches, they have been of limited use. Now in eBay Desktop you can access your existing favorite searches or create new ones, and view those lists of items as "feeds" just like you would in an RSS reader. In this view you can see if an item is new, and you can delete items that you aren't interested in.

Download eBay Desktop, and let me know what you think. Feel free to contact me directly (see link in the sidebar) and the application has a built in feature request and bug report widget.

5 Lessons Learned from Working with AIR

This morning I presented a talk at the Adobe On Air Los Angeles tour stop. My presentation was called "Lessons Learned from Developing on AIR." Although Adobe AIR has only been publicly available in beta for a short time, Project San Dimas, which is built on AIR, of course, has been in development for over a year, and both San Dimas and AIR have come a long way. Here is a summary of the talk:

Overview

San Dimas started out as a prototype, intended to show off eBay's web services and Adobe's client technology. Since web services are difficult to demonstrate visually, we often like to show applications that use our web services, to show some of the possibilities. At the same time as we were exploring this demo opportunity with Adobe, they told us about an exciting new client platform they were developing called "Apollo." Given that the plan was to show the first demos of Apollo at Adobe MAX '06, we jumped at the opportunity to develop "something cool" on Apollo, although we didn't know at the time what we would end up building.

We didn't have much time, and we hastily assembled a team from eBay and EffectiveUI (a development and design company highly recommended to us by Adobe) to work on the project. The initial team size was very small - just 3 people, and even now we have kept the team very small, expanding so far only to 7. We presented the first prototype at MAX, which was very well received. Since the team has been continually developing and designing the prototype into a full eBay desktop application, with features including search, bidding, My eBay, history, and alerts; and with a design fully customized to take advantage of the artistic freedom made possible by AIR.

Here are 5 lessons I've learned in the process of working with AIR:

Lesson 1: Start with a good foundation

While San Dimas has a radically different UI from the eBay website, it is not something that has been built totally from scratch. eBay's web services platform has been in development since 1999, and San Dimas uses those web services exclusively to connect to eBay's backend systems. We've had to make zero changes to our web services thusfar to support San Dimas. If we had, it would have put the project schedule at serious risk (and believe me, there was enough risk already as it was).

If you are starting out developing an AIR application, I recommend that you consider an SOA or web services architecture - this will ensure you don't tie yourself too closely to one type of client, whether that be browser-based, desktop, or something else.

Lesson 2: Design takes a long time

We spent 3 months developing the prototype that was shown at MAX, and of that time, 6 weeks was spent on design, before we started coding. AIR offers lots of freedom, and because of this you may find yourself having a hard time deciding on a design for your application. You could apply existing web design paradigms, but this may not lead to an optimal user experience.

Lesson 3: Betas are really useful

San Dimas has been in beta for just over a month, and in that short time we've had thousands of users sign up for the beta, and hundreds give us feedback on feature requests or bugs. Launching "beta" web sites or applications to generate early buzz is in vogue, but I've learned already through our beta that they are well worth the time and effort, assuming that you intend on actually listening to your beta users, and are prepared to change your plans if what they are telling you is a surprise. If you are planning to develop an application on AIR, I'd encourage you to get early feedback from users through a beta program.

Lesson 4: The most important AIR feature is: freedom from the design constraints of the browser

Although AIR provides lots of useful features for developing desktop applications, such as file APIs, windowing support, and a complete HTML renderer, I have found that the most important feature of AIR is that it is not a web browser. Standard browser user experience metaphors like the back button and location bar impose a set of assumptions about how web applications should work - assumptions that might work well for certain kinds of applications, but not for all. For all the magic shown by some leading AJAX-powered web applications, they still have a long way to go in terms of performance, features, and user experience.

Lesson 5: Users don't care about AIR

And that's a good thing! AIR does a very good job of getting out of the way. It has an excellent installation experience -- applications can bundle the runtime with the application, and installation can be triggered from a Flash movie in the browser, which has worked very well with San Dimas. AIR provides a very useful application update framework. And AIR applications behave like any other desktop application. These "little" things really matter, and I'm glad that Adobe has paid attention to them in AIR. One of the measure of AIR's success will if users don't realize it is even there.

Thanks to Adobe for the opportunity to share what I've learned, and thank you for creating such a great platform!

You can sign up for the San Dimas beta so you can try it out for yourself.

eBay's San Dimas Project - Big in France

I've been very pleased by the positive reaction to San Dimas. We have beta testers from all over the world -- the US leads the way in terms of number of beta testers, no surprise there. However, I was surprised to find out that the number 2 country is... France! This is despite both Germany and the UK having bigger eBay usage. Also, there is no translated version of the interface yet, and we have done zero press about San Dimas in France up until now.

As if it weren't enough to be number 2 in beta testers, French bloggers and media have written up a storm about it. Here are some of the stories:

Nouvelle version d'eBay en préparation

This was the first French article, and was published back in April. After this was published we saw a big spike in beta user registrations from .fr email addresses.

Premiers pas dans le projet San Dimas - AccessOweb, le blog

What appears to be an in-depth review of the San Dimas features. I say "appears to be" because I can't actually be sure, since I was an abject failure in learning French, this despite my four years of French class in junior high and high school.

One of the commenters on the blog post says this:

"Pour en revenir au graphisme, moi je le trouve au contraire très bien foutu : plus classe que du html avec de légers dégradés, et surtout un écran pas surchargé du tout où l'on pourrait se perdre, comme sur la homepage d'ebay. On ne peut pas non plus le constater sur des screenshots mais la navigation est très agréable également. Bref joli test pour une jolie application !"

Which Google translates into this:

"To return from there to graphics, me I find it very well on the contrary foutu: more class that HTML with light ranges, and especially a screen not overloaded of the whole where one could lose oneself, as on the homepage of ebay. One cannot either note it on screenshots but navigation is very pleasant also. In short pretty test for a pretty application!"

Umm... thanks?

Application riche #13 : eBay San Dimas - Fabien Deshayes - Du client riche à un Internet riche

Another in-depth review, I think. My favorite quote is the following:

"La grande force de San Dimas est à mon avis cette navigation complètement nouvelle qui casse les codes d'une page web, ou même d'une application de bureau plus classique : fini les pop-up, les rechargement : ici tout se fait par onglets ou par panneaux, profitant à merveille des technologies Flex et Air pour donner un style à part entière à San Dimas."

Which translates as:

"The great force of San Dimas is in my opinion this navigation completely new which breaks the codes of a Web page, or even of an application of more traditional office: finished the popones, recharging: here all is done by mitres or panels, benefitting wonder from technologies Flex and Air to give a style to whole share in San Dimas."

I'm calling pop-ups "popones" from now on.

Que sont les applications riches (RIA) ? - Partie 3 - Quel futur pour l'Internet riche ?

There is a small San Dimas mention in this article, which is a three part magnum opus on Rich Internet Applications. (3 part blog post! Take that, Twitter!).

What I like about this one is that it refers to San Dimas as "projet San Dimas d'eBay".

Premiers regards Vidéo : Project San Dimas : Ebay en Apollo

I've saved the best for last. Somebody made a 17 minute (17!) video of a San Dimas walkthrough. In French. I have no idea what the narrator is saying. Can anyone help translate this?

Bravo, French San Dimasers, Bravo

San Dimas Beta Invitations Going Out... Now!

I'm pleased to announce that the beta program for the eBay "San Dimas" project has begun! If you signed up for eBay San Dimas in the first couple days after we opened sign-ups (in April), you should have an invitation sitting in your inbox. I'm also knee-deep trying to figure out how to get invitations out to everyone who was at eBay DevCon - I know that there are some users who have got them and some who have, but it is a manual task that I haven't yet figured out how to automate. Poor me :-) Here is a screenshot of the build we are sending out:

I got to show San Dimas in the keynote on Monday, and thankfully it went off without a hitch. Doing live demos on real production data with a beta product running on a beta platform is a recipe for disaster, but I wanted to risk it and show everyone the product. Thanks to everyone for the compliments, and thank you to everyone who came to my "Desktop 2.0" session later on. Also thank you to the beta users (including beta user number 1 -- you know who you are) who have sent in lots of great suggestions (and plenty of bug reports) already. We are working hard on fixing the highest priority bugs, and will push out a new build by the end of the week.

One of the points I made in my session, and that I want to re-emphasize here, is that I would love for San Dimas to become a platform that third-party developers can "plug-in" to. I'll stress that this may not happen - and if it does it is a long way off. Having said that, I had great conversations with developers in Boston about things that they would like to do with an eBay desktop application, if they had the ability to extend it or integrate with it.

We are busy enough working on the first version of the product, so we haven't sat down to think through what we need in the technology for allowing third parties to extend San Dimas, but now is the right time to talk to developers, so that anything we do allows developers to create things they have told us would be useful, not just what we think they should do with it. I want to continue that conversation on this blog and elsewhere. During the day 3 keynote, Pierre said that third party developers are a crucial engine of innovation, and I agree with him 100%.

So, developers, if San Dimas were a platform, what would you do with it?

Want to Be the First to Try San Dimas?

I'm auctioning off the first San Dimas beta invitation. Whoever wins the auction will get their invitation at least 6 hours before everyone else. All of the auction proceeds will go to charity, so you really should bid on it. Also, while you are at it, do me a favor and spread this eBay togo widget far and wide, k? (click the "Copy this widget" link on the bottom and follow the instructions)

The team is working hard on the San Dimas beta - we are feature-complete, and are in bug-fixing and tweaking mode. I can't tell when we plan to start sending out invitations, but I will say that there is a dependency on something that I'm not allowed to talk about. And whenever that dependency is cleared up and that other thing is finished it will be just about the right time to start the limited beta. Is that all clear now?

eBay ToGo Launched

eBay has launched eBay ToGo - Flash-based widgets you can embed anywhere that allows Flash content. Here is mine:

I consulted on this project, which means that I was asked to some of the meetings and got to spout of my opinions without having to do any of the actual work. I think the best part about these widgets is that they really push the boundaries of offering up useful functionality without forcing you back to the website. Try the search box - it lets you search eBay from within the widget itself.

eBay ToGo (not eBay Togo - thats an island in the South Pacific) is of course built on eBay Web Services - specifically our REST API. As I point out in the Techcrunch article announcing the launch, we have some great new services that we are working on that we will be showing off at our Developers Conference in June.

San Dimas Beta Signup is Open

I'm happy to announce that the beta program for San Dimas is now accepting signups. We will send out applications soon, and the earlier you sign up , the better chance that you'll get to use it when we start sending out invitations.

I'll be writing more about San Dimas on the San Dimas Blog, which is hosted on eBay's own blogging platform. I plan to write there on the features and functionality of San Dimas as we develop it, and I hope to use that blog to get community feedback on what we are building. I'll keep blogging here on occasion about the usual web services and more technical stuff.

There has been a great response to San Dimas here at Web 2.0 Expo -- There has been some great press written about it recently, including Wall Street Journal and Techcrunch. Thanks to everyone who has blogged about it or signed up for the beta.