When eBay makes changes big or small, a very vocal group of buyers and sellers react. Now, eBay is trying to involve its users earlier in the process by getting their input before new features are introduced.

The first change to be crowd sourced this way is a set of new tools to search eBay’s Web site. EBay has about 200 million items for sale at any given time, and sifting through that list can be burdensome.

Instead of rolling out the search features to all users, eBay will put them in a new place on the site Garden by eBay. People can choose to use the new tools, rate them and send critiques to the product team, which will continually tweak them. Some will fail and others will be incorporated into the main site.

“It’s imperative that we have a deeper conversation with customers and buyers,” said Christopher Payne, vice president of search. “It’s fair to say it’s a cultural change at eBay.”

But it is necessary to provide a better retail experience, he said.

This kind of experimentation with the help of users is akin to what other technology companies do to test new products before their release. Google, for example, publicly tries new ideas in its Google Labs area.

John Donahoe, eBay’s chief executive, said in a recent interview that eBay was becoming more of a technology-driven company, including with search. “One of our biggest problems on eBay is we have too much inventory,” he said. “To be told you have 28,000 search results doesn’t really help you if you just want one.”

Some of the changes eBay is testing are similar to methods other e-commerce sites use to make it easier to find the item a shopper is looking for.

For example, categories to narrow a search — such as choosing a style, color or brand of a handbag — used to be buried, but will now show up higher on the page. Right now, to narrow a search to, say, a never-opened Nikon point-and-shoot 10-megapixel digital camera, a shopper has to click on five separate pages. The new tools will let people hover over the categories, narrowing the search with a single click.

A little toolbar that follows the shopper on the page will give the option to see similar listings (such as new digital cameras) or remove similar listings (all camera accessories or used cameras.)

Shoppers will also be able to view items as a gallery instead of a list, or view a side-by-side comparison of fixed-price and auction sales, to determine, before making a purchase, whether there is a better trade-off, said Josh Ramirez, senior product manager for search experience at eBay.

The new search results being tested by eBay are much cleaner, without ads, borders and highlighted text. The search box will stay at the top of the viewing page as shoppers scrolls down, so they can avoid scrolling back up to the top to revise a search.

Users can see an image of the product, its title, price and whether it is selling at fixed-price or auction all on the left side of the search results, as opposed to having to scroll to the right to see sales information. With all the information clustered together, the site looks less like a spreadsheet, Mr. Payne said.

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Core Components of an E-Commerce Website

If you break down any E-Commerce website into its primary components, you would see that it basically involves combining an easy-to-use, manageable website design with a Shopping Cart Program and an Online Merchant Account – then setting those up through a reliable E-Commerce Hosting provider. If you acquire each of these components and integrate them together, you will have the basics you need to start attracting customers and selling your products & services online.

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