eBay, the world’s online marketplace, is launching Catch, a new shopping experience that brings fun, inspiration and value by offering cool, trendy and unexpected products at the best prices. Catch caters to users who love to browse and discover. The platform specifically addresses young value-driven shoppers, a big group among the Millennial segment, who want to discover the newest and hottest products at great prices and shop spontaneously, and have high expectations for service and engaging, fun experiences. Catch brings together the best of value inventory from eBay’s sellers from Germany as well as from all over the world.
In addition to traditional product categories such as Fashion, Home and Tech Gadgets, Catch brings to users an experience of thematic product “worlds”, allowing them to shop the way they live – whether it be Wanderlust for the avid traveler, or Pink Wall for one who is excited about anything in the pastel hue. The combination of Catch’s trend-spotters, tastemakers and data scientists allows the platform to create these worlds and tailor them directly for what’s relevant to value-oriented Millennials, bringing the best of eBay’s vast inventory to the Catch experience. eBay is launching Catch as a beta version exclusively in the German market.
“Through our ability to identify emerging shopping patterns via the eBay platform, the success of our ‘Under 20€’ experience launched earlier this year, as well as market monitoring, we identified a big opportunity for us to address the younger 'value shoppers' in Germany in a different way”, said Eben Sermon, eBay’s Managing Director in Germany. “While many [of them] feel attracted by the eBay experience, many also enjoy a more browsing-focused experience – especially with regard to more discovery-focused categories like Fashion or Home Decoration. This is what we intend to solve for with Catch: It is much more an inspiration, browse and check-it-often type of site filled with lots of trending inventory and, thus, a complementary platform to eBay. We very deliberately decided on an off-eBay experience – yet, one that leverages the best of eBay’s strengths like the breadth of eBay’s inventory, eBay’s vast inventory data or eBay’s trust & safety tools,” Sermon added. This is enabled through eBay’s extensive API service for inventory and transaction processing.
Catch surfaces the best of eBay’s value inventory in fun and inspirational ways. It stems from a mix of German and international sellers.
The new experience caters for the younger value shoppers’ and Millennials’ needs for a shopping experience that offers both convenience and engagement. The experience offers high levels of safety, building on eBay’s deep experience and proven trust programs like Buyer Protection and eBay Guarantee that will also apply to purchases made on Catch. At the same time, the experience is very transparent. Every item’s description clearly outlines the different shipping options and costs as well as expected delivery times. In addition, a large portion of the items offered on Catch ship completely for free.
Catch has been designed as a beautiful, visual-first experience that is clean and streamlined. It is primarily aimed at a mobile audience where trending shopping categories can be browsed in short, snackable moments. This style of shopping resonated well during testing with Millennial shoppers and fits with their shopping preferences.
“Marketplaces like eBay need to cater for a very broad range of different types of shoppers. We see our responsibility in reinventing shopping for these shoppers all the time. That is why we are experimenting with different experiences, price points and shopping formats on behalf of our sellers and their inventory,” Eben Sermon commented. “Catch is one of the experiments that we are seeding to advance and transform our business in Germany. We will launch it as beta and we will be rolling out further features like time-limited deals in the coming weeks.” Additional engagements elements, like gamification, will be integrated into the experience soon. These will make the Catch experience even more unique and distinct.