eBay Hosts Leaders to Showcase AMP Technology, Driving Better Mobile Experiences

Steadily, eBay’s mobile experiences are becoming faster and more efficient thanks to AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) technology. Our very first Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) meetup took place on April 27 at our headquarters in San Jose. It featured creators and advanced users of the cutting-edge technology, highlighting cross-company collaboration.

During the event, attendees took in a technically deep panel discussion titled “Dive into AMP through the Ecommerce Lens,” moderated by Lakshimi Duraivenkatesh, Senior Director of Shopping Experience Engineering. Panelists included Rudy Galfi from Google, Lon Ingram from Retailmenot, Victor Chen from Fandango.com and Senthil Padmanabhan from eBay. The event was live streamed for the benefit of remote audience members and participants also shared their experiences live on Twitter via #eBayMeetup

The meetup was kicked off by Mohan Patt, Vice President, Buyer Experience. “Mobile web is a critical and fast-growing platform for eBay,” he said. “Most of the new users come from mobile web. The AMP project rekindled our focus on it.” After that, Rudy Galfi, a product manager at Google presented on the future of AMP.

Since 2015, eBay has made significant investments in creating compelling shopping experiences for users by leveraging our structured data, artificial intelligence and the mobile web. Mobile web is an especially important platform for attracting new users, and speed is essential to delivering good experiences for them.

Even though AMP was first created to address the user needs found on news and publishing sites, eBay proactively engaged with Google to initiate the direction for AMP for ecommerce. eBay is one of the biggest and most complex use cases for AMP, which we brought live on our platform in August of 2016, and we have more than 20 million eBay browse pages served through AMP technology. eBay also contributes back to the AMP open source project.

At the meetup, it was great to see the panelists discussing the gaps in AMP around tracking, experimentation and personalization. “Google is committed to make AMP for ecommerce a big success” said Galfi.

Victor Chen from Fandango talked about his company’s journey with Progressive Web Apps (PWA) and the speed and business benefits it brought to their product pages. “AMP brought in the culture of best front-end development practices which is applicable to non-AMP pages,” said Lon Ingram from Retailmenot.

Senthil Padmanabhan, who leads the AMP initiative at eBay, talked about how eBay’s existing development workflow helped in implementing the technology seamlessly.

The meeting showcased not just AMP, but the strong and positive collaboration around it that leading companies are driving together. The full panel discussion video is available above.