Ebay Monetization - 2025
Improving Price Transparency in eBay Offers
Making negotiations clearer and more trustworthy after the launch of the buyer protection fee.
Ebay’s Challenge
When eBay introduced the buyer protection fee in UK, buyers and sellers began seeing different prices in the Offers flow. Buyers saw all in price, while sellers only saw item price. This discrepancy created confusion and mistrust during negotiations.
I led the design effort to bring clarity and fairness back to the Offers experience while navigating shifting scope, technical constraints, and executive pivots
“When I make offers, the seller says they will accept £6 but when I offer £6 the actual amount the seller gets is a lot less than £6 so they refuse. There is no way of telling what £6 is aside from buyer protection... I don’t think this business with insurance and no fees and money the seller gets has been communicated across correctly.”
“It’s so confusing. When I received the offer I thought I would get the whole amount. But when the buyer paid you deducted the buyer protection fee from my final offer. It shouldn’t work like this. The buyer should pay extra for buyer protection and I should receive the full amount like £10 without seeing how much the buyer actually pays.”
The Opportunity
This challenge presented an opportunity to rebuild trust and transparency in one of eBay’s most critical buyer-seller touchpoints - the Offers flow. By realigning how price information was displayed, we aimed to reduce confusion, restore confidence in the new buyer protection model, and ultimately improve CSAT and offer acceptance rates.
What buyers see
What sellers see
My Role & Approach
As the lead designer on the Monetization team, I drove the end-to-end design process, from framing the problem to final execution. I collaborated closely with PMs, researchers, and engineers to understand the behavioral and business impact of the pricing discrepancy, and partnered with data science to define success metrics around CSAT recovery and offer acceptance rate.
Given the shifting priorities and technical constraints, my focus was on creating alignment and momentum. I led structured design reviews, clarified decision paths, and maintained design continuity through multiple scope pivots. Throughout, I pushed for simple, trustworthy interactions, ensuring both buyers and sellers could make informed decisions with confidence.
Audit & Opportunity
Solutions
Learnings & Iterations
Through five UXR studies, multiple design iterations, and late-stage feedback from the ELT, we uncovered key insights that helped us refine our approach
Designing for sellers, not both.
Midway through the project, a new lead designer joined and took over the workstream. Around the same time, our team presented the explorations to the eBay Executive Leadership Team (ELT). While initial user research supported a more transparent, buyer-seller aligned experience, ELT feedback emphasized risk mitigation and messaging control.
This late-stage feedback required us to pivot direction quickly, narrowing scope to focus on seller-facing clarity first. I collaborated with the new design lead to reframe our work around the most critical user pain points, while using insights from UXR to guide which elements of transparency could still add value without introducing complexity or misalignment with business goals.
While challenging, this moment reinforced the importance of designing with flexibility, anticipating executive feedback, and maintaining momentum amid changing priorities. It was a valuable lesson in balancing vision with pragmatism.
Original design direction
Revised design direction
Consistency price language builds confidence.
Users wanted predictability across platforms, driving us to unify web and app patterns. We also iterate and align with legal on developing a consistent pricing language.
Consistent Price Transparency Across Platforms
Live Fee Calculator should be simplified
Real-time updates built trust with sellers and bring clarity to seller’s take home amount and help sellers price their listing better. We iterate on multiple versions of Live calc, and eventually landed on the simplest version
Constraints
I navigated technical, legal, and business constraints by partnering with Eng, Product, Buyer/Seller Experience, and PMM; collaborating with Legal on compliant display of pricing; and aligning with LT & ELT through multiple reviews. This secured buy-in and positioned Offers price monetization effort in eBay’s broader trust and payments strategy.
Aligned
50 stakeholders, 5 cross-functional teams
Collaborated
10+ working sessions with Legal & Compliance
Reviewed
4 rounds of LT & ELT executive reviews.
Impact on the business
17%
YoY GMV Lift
76%
Neutral & Positive Mentions
19%
Increase in Offer Acceptance Rate
10%
Decrease in Offer Decline Rate