Autopay in auction

Introducing autopay into eBay auctions

Led the end to end design that touches 5+ different domain teams.
🎨 Jan 2024 - Mar 2024
🚀 MVP test launched in May 2024

The goal of reducing unpaid items became eBay’s top priority since 2022

Business problem

7% unpaid item rate causing significant amount of GMB lost at eBay

Customer problem

eBay sellers doesn’t get paid and need to re-list item again

Before

After

MVP design highlights

Bring autopay feature in auction flow without fundamental change

First time use education

Introduce the new game rule of 1 hour delayed autopay experience to manage expectation once we get buyers’ intent to place a bid.

Payment collection for autopay

Get buyers’ consent to set up autopay payment method before entering bidding amount.

1 hour for manual checkout before autopay

After winning auction, buyers get 1 hour to manually checkout with more checkout functionalities(e.g change payment, apply coupon, etc,.).

Otherwise, eBay will auto-charge to complete the transaction.

Autopay MVP experience without fundamental changes will be ramped ASAP within tight timeline. In parallel, I started discovering pain points in legacy auction flow and socializing fundamental design changes with domain teams to get buy-in.

Enhancement highlights

Proposals of fundamental changes in legacy auction flow, to make this popular buying format even more fun at eBay!

Takeways

Working on a horizontal team like this requires lots of communication with multiple other domain teams to learn their domain context, get buy-in, and get sign-off, since our design team doesn’t own the flow.

New legal requirement resulted from new autopay mechanism offers me great opportunities to learn various payment policies in different locations, since our new autopay solution will be launching in US, UK, and DE market.

Proposing new change into legacy design/code might be more challenging than I expected, but advocating for best user experience will still set the foundation for long term product success, even it can not be done in the short term.