Starting way back in 2014—and right up until early 2022—Evil Martians has been the core technical team working on the eBaymag product, with our operations covering all the major technical areas: product analytics, UI design, the tech stack itself, the infrastructure and its maintenance, and feature releases. We built the current version of eBaymag from the very first line of code, and as the project has undergone many transformations over the course of its progression, a side-effect of these changes is that Evil Martians itself has undergone a bit of a metamorphosis, too.
Open borders for successful sales
eBay is an ecommerce pioneer and a global marketplace leader that offers sellers the ability to grow a business with low barriers to entry, regardless of the seller’s size, background, or geographic location. As they like to say: “We win when our sellers succeed”.
Yet, in spite of these ideals, seven years ago, eBay was essentially composed of purely domestic classifieds. This means that American sellers sold mostly to their fellow Americans, and likewise, Britons targeted customers who were physically located in the United Kingdom.
This happened because eBay initially matured as an American company, and only after a couple of years, it kickstarted international offices. To allow for rapid growth, each regional site developed in an isolated market for a long time. And although there was a certain level of unification and a single branding, these regional sites had no unified catalogs, currencies, amongst other discrepancies.
And indeed, right along these same lines, the eBaymag project began as a small website featuring some guideline documentation for sellers alongside a call center to support them, and it was targeted to just one domestic market. As fate would have it, eBay quickly realized that local sellers were primarily using their site for cross-border commerce. Accordingly, upon grasping the implications of this situation, the platform was tweaked to let sellers easily target foreign customers, resulting in a 50 percent surge in exports.
Flash forward to today: eBaymag is now an official eBay’s B2B tool helping sellers implement cross-border trades to sell their listings on markets as diverse as France, the United States, Canada, Australia, Great Britain, Spain, as well as many others. In fact, in total, 120 territories and 9 local sites are available for cross-border transactions.
As a result, the platform sees up to 55% more sales, and makes it so that sellers need not solely depend on their local markets. Moreover, the tool has seen widespread adoption, and over 51 thousand accounts regularly use it to publish products for sale.
The export process: moving items from one local market to another
