eBay Motors, Tire Installation

When I joined the project, installation only had a ~0.2% attach rate. By June 2023, we had 1,500 more installers, more than 5,000 US locations, and over 75% of tires eligible. Buyers in five major markets could ship tires to more than 10,000 local shops.

On the Q1 2023 earnings call, eBay’s CEO said the rebuild reached desktop and mobile web in Q4 2022 and the apps in Q1 2023, already driving “a meaningful uplift in the attach rate of installation services to tire purchases.” Phase 1 shipped badging, a clearer checkout, and a confirmed drop-off window. Phase 2 put scheduling on eBay.

What I designed

Shopping flow and service discovery

• Updated tire fitment interface
• Picking a local shop separately from the tire seller
• New installation service booking system
• Post checkout experience
• Shipping the tires to the shop so the buyer can drop the car off

What I led

• Design through Phase 2, on the app and desktop in the US, Germany, and the UK, in parallel with Guaranteed Fit
• Getting installation onto search, the listing, checkout, and payments, surfaces Motors did not own
• Partner direction with SimpleTire and CarAdvise while live appointment times were still being worked out
• A spec that engineering could build from, so Phase 1 could ship in a two-week sprint

The opportunity

Buying tires is a difficult process, especially online because you don’t have a knowledgeable person to walk you through the process. How do you know what tires you need, and how do you get them installed? What happens if they arrive and don’t fit, and you have to ship four huge tires back?

That puts a lot of uncertainty and burden on the buyer, especially if their vehicle has a flat in their driveway. Only about 0.2% of tire buyers added installation, far below other tire retailers.

If you did find the service and added it, checkout ended with a vague “someone will contact you” instead of a way to book an appointment. If you sought help through eBay’s own help pages, the pages didn’t agree on who would reach out: the buyer, the installer, or eBay.

Tires and wheels was a $40B+ business in the US and Canada, and eBay had about $0.8B of it at the end of 2021. SimpleTire estimated about 30% of tire buyers come in wanting installation. Its attach rate ran about 30%, and Tire Rack’s was over 50%. The problem broke down into three areas: awareness, confidence, and trust.

Constraints

I had two weeks to design Phase 1. The legacy code couldn’t talk to the rest of the purchase flow, and eBay’s value-added services platform was still under construction, so the design had to fit both. The flow ran through search, the listing, and checkout, pages other teams owned, so I was designing on surfaces my team didn’t control.

Appointment management wasn’t something I could design yet. Live appointment times were still being worked out with fulfillment partners, including how a service appointment drop-off time would be passed between multiple infrastructures. Search guarded anything that touched its pages, so an installation badge would take sustained negotiation.

Decisions part 1

I felt like we could anchor a lot of decisions around the three key issues: awareness, confidence, and trust. But we needed to really dig into these and frame them around customer problems. With the help of eBay’s UX Research team, we set up a series of workshops with the greater Motors team to help answer some open questions: Who is our buyer? What is our competition doing? What are the key customer problems, and where do those problems show up in the shopping and purchase flows?

Key workshop takeaways

Who buys tires

eBay’s UX Research team had identified four personas, and for the purpose of the installation project workshops, we focused primarily on one of them, Premium shoppers. Premium shoppers cared most about an installation offering, and they were the group eBay served least.

The segmentation below is those four personas. The next board is the purchase occasions.

About 30% of tire GMV was break-fix, a flat or a damaged tire that needs attention now, and eBay’s model couldn’t serve that well. About half was replacing worn tires, which isn’t time sensitive and fits eBay fine. On that board those are fix and change. It also includes improve and restore.

Four tire buyer personas from an attitudinal segmentation

Four tire buyer personas from an attitudinal segmentation

Fit

Tire and wheel purchase occasions

Tire and wheel purchase occasions

Fit

Installers are not sellers

The buyer picks tires from a seller and a shop from an installer, and the order of those choices changes the whole flow. I felt it was important to identify the best flow. Install last lets people shop by vehicle or size, see search results with guidance, and decide on installation at the listing or checkout. Install up front asks first, checks for installers within a distance, and lets people change the distance or leave if there aren’t any.

Three orders of steps

Three orders of steps

Fit

Customer problems

Identifying problems in the flow was also an important step for the team to take together. Buyers didn’t know eBay offered installation. On search they couldn’t tell which listings were eligible. On the listing, installation was a checkbox people overlooked, and sometimes it showed when the item wasn’t eligible.

There was no way to filter shops by distance. The cart had no installation context. Checkout took one listing at a time, so front and rear tires in different sizes meant two orders. After checkout there were no instructions.

Problems by page

View screens

Problems by page

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Search result page 01/05

Empathy map

I love creating empathy maps because they show that there is a much deeper level to the work. In this case it showed the fear, anxiety, worry, lack of confidence, and lack of trust that customers were feeling, through the eyes of the team itself. It was important to fix that for eBay, but also for me, because this is ultimately not about a tire. It is about a human who needs help.

Ten-minute empathy map for a tire buyer

Ten-minute empathy map for a tire buyer

Fit

Decisions part 2

What the workshops confirmed

The workshops confirmed the assumption we started with. The problem broke down into three areas: awareness, confidence, and trust.

Buyers didn’t know eBay offered installation, and on search they couldn’t tell which listings were eligible. Premium shoppers cared most about an installation offering, and they were the group eBay served least. The empathy map showed the person under that: fear, anxiety, worry, lack of confidence, and lack of trust. It was ultimately not about a tire. It was about a human who needs help.

How we fixed it

Awareness was friction and placement, not only a badge. Tire installation had to be present at every step of the shopping and purchasing experience, so buyers could see that eBay offered it and which listings were eligible.

Confidence was confirmation, communication, and control. Buyers could book and manage appointments, with clear indicators that what they were trying to do had been accomplished, instead of “someone will contact you.”

Trust was follow-through, feedback, and post-purchase communication. At checkout, buyers knew what was happening, and what would happen after they closed the app or the browser.

Learnings

I had two weeks to design the first phase. It was a lot of fast-moving work under pressure. It’s easy to lose sight of the core problem, and at certain times of this project I feel like I got very executional and lost track of the core aspect we had uncovered.

People were afraid, anxious, and worried. I learned a lesson eventually that has stuck with me.

If you can anchor the work you are doing around a human problem, the actual voice of the user or customer, it can answer executional questions for you. You don’t have to negotiate the facts.