We noticed this story earlier today about the launch of Ebay’s new operation for getting its seller community to create individualized websites. And it reminded us of Yahoo!s own efforts in that regard, started years ago. Mostly because, years ago, we also worked in conjunction with BusinessWeek to evaulate and make recommendations about a small business site built on Yahoo!s platform. In a nutshell, although the general usability of both site and platform was fair, one drawback for true custom development was Yahoo!s use at the time of a non-standard programming language.

So, we’re wondering how user-friendly some of the ProStores sites are going to be. Nick and others are taking a look as we speak at the existing community as well as some of the featured stores. Stay tuned. In the meantime, a superficial examination of the ProStores site itself is interesting, given the order in which the various “levels” of ProStores service are presented on the homepage. They run from left to right across the page, with the leftmost being the least expensive option.

That’s interesting, because there’s some argument to suggest (absent data on this particular site, of course) that by far the most prominent option is therefore the most expensive one (people tend to read from left to right). As we’ve pointed out in many other posts, Catalyst and CoFactors are always more sympathetic than most usability consulting firms to the realities of balancing business with classic design principles. We suspect that’s just what’s going on here - and in fairness, it appears quite clear that there are in fact four options of decreasing cost. That said, it’s amusing to see that the cheapest one (which is still a very good deal from the looks of it, because you get a cart, two pages, 10 item display and PayPal fulfillment) is not only the last one most people will read, but also the only one not outlined in color. Indeed, to our eyes, it almost vanishes in an otherwise bright and bubbly page.

Does this serve their audience of sellers correctly? Tough to say from the outside, of course. But there are at least two major groups of sellers: the high-powered, vocal, organized ones who make their living off the Ebay marketplace - and then the dabblers in e-commerce, who are regulars but never do much volume. And the question for Ebay as a business is a classic one: can it earn more money, faster, off the “enterprise” sale? Or off the “express” option? Given the price differential ($250.00 vs. $7.00 per month), it’s hard to say; the intent may be to drive people to the middle two scenarios. All told, an interesting design question. More to come.

JF

This entry was posted on Friday, June 24th, 2005 at 1:55 pm and is filed under Usability, Interaction Strategy.