Buy the Items You Love Again and Again on eBay
By Asheem Sinha
People come to eBay to get their favorite items from their favorite sellers. The strength of eBay’s marketplace relies on connecting sellers and their listings with buyers. Our customers have shown us they repurchase the same listings across all categories on the site. Whether it’s buying everyday essentials or business and industrial items, they trust the people they have bought from and the items they have received before.
However, until now, it wasn’t easy for buyers to land on the same item page to make a repurchase. This is in large part because we have 1.4 billion listings sold by millions of sellers on our site. So today, we are announcing an all new feature called Buy Again. This new button takes the friction out of finding and repurchasing a favorite find on eBay. Now, when buyers go to their My eBay > Purchases page on iOS or to the eBay hamburger menu on Android, they can scroll through a list of their purchases and will see a Buy Again button. This button allows them to quickly purchase that item from the same seller that they have purchased from before.
“Buy Similar” Button
If the same item is not available from the same seller, buyers can use the Buy Similar button. eBay’s search algorithms will then surface similar inventory, using the purchase title. Buyers will see the same product sold by a different seller; the same product in a different variant (think of the same sneaker in different colors); or a similar product (like a different running sneaker from the same brand). It’s that simple.
Seamless Experience for Buyers, Sellers
For buyers, our goal is to provide a seamless experience to help discover relevant items to repurchase. For sellers, this is another feature that brings return buyers back to your eBay listings.
The Buy Again button is now available in all territories in Purchase history on eBay’s native apps for iOS and Android. It will be available on desktop in 2020. We will also test a dedicated repurchase experience via a Buy Again page, which will make it easier for buyers to find the items that they’d like to purchase again in one place.
Originally published at https://tech.ebayinc.com on December 5, 2019.