Tagging Along with our Visits Program

As some of you might know (especially if you've read our pre-blog version of The Chatter), one of  the ways we learn what our members need is through our Visits program. This pretty much works exactly how it sounds - a few employees visit a willing member for a few hours and simply watch how they use eBay, as well as other ecommerce sites. Well, not just watching. One of these days we're going to have a full-fledged wrist injury as a result of the furious note-taking going on. We give them very little direction outside of general requests such as "show us how you'd find a book" so that we don't influence how they use the site. It's remarkably helpful for us - it's always amazing to see how many different ways people will go about doing "simple" tasks.

I recently asked Krisela, our uber-friendly head of the Visits program, if I could tag along on one so I could blog about it. I figured it might be a no-go because some members might be a little shy about being featured here. But fortunately, Krisela thought it was a great idea and said she had the "perfect person coming up for what I wanted to do."

So last week we headed about an hour north to the lovely town of Alameda and met up with Mark, better known as mdzzzz on the site. Krisela had told me he was a huge collector, but nothing prepared me for what was in the house. Between him and his partner Steve (wescocub), the entire house was filled with things they'd bought on eBay - chandeliers, paintings, lamps, books, you name it (although I'm not sure the giant replica Statue of Liberty in the front yard was an eBay find). And I haven't even started on the pug collection - they are HUGE fans of pugs (the dogs you can see here). To go along with the three actually living in the house, they had just about every type of pug-related collectible known to man, but more on that later. That's Steve on the left and Mark on the right, and a taste of their pug items in the picture to the left.

Anyway, we headed off to Mark's computer room. After Larry and Martha (two of our other researchers) and I found seats, Krisela took charge. We started off with a brief discussion about the types of things he'll buy online. Not surprisingly, he said it all depended on how fast he needed the item, and what the shipping charges were compared to retail. He then hopped on the computer, and Krisela asked him how he'd find a particular item on the site. Mark decided to search for pug stuff, his favorite. After pulling up search results, he noticed that some unwanted items were showing up, and he was frustrated that he couldn't get rid of them (it was all I could do not to pipe up and show him the Advanced Search Commands page, which would've gotten me banned from all future Visits). All was well later on, though, when Steve showed him how to exclude certain search terms.

Because our Visits team wanted to get some research on how people use Half.com, we next switched to books. Mark decided to search for the one he's currently reading, "The Godfather's Revenge" (he doesn't recommend it). He had never used Half before, so we asked him to compare it to...uhh...some other well-known shopping sites. In what should make Amy Skeeters-Behrens from our Half.com team proud, he liked how the search results on Half seemed to be more compact than elsewhere (and to keep some shred of journalistic integrity, he did like how some other sites showed you an excerpt from the book in question to help you decide whether to buy it).

  About this time one of their dogs, appropriately named Pugsley, wandered in, and my notes strangely became less detailed, probably due to the fact I was reaching down and scratching him for about 10 minutes (I got caught in the act to the left). He acted as a nice footwarmer for awhile before deciding to take a nap on his dogbed nearby. Meanwhile, none of that remotely broke the concentration of Krisela, Martha and Larry - and I realized I might not be cut out for this.

We then moved on to how Mark might search for items locally. As you would probably expect, he mentioned Craigslist as a good local site, and then Steve piped up with a quote that any marketer would dream about. Describing how he doesn't really view eBay as a local site, he said "You use eBay to shop the world!" I can just feel commercials being cut already around that idea. As we watched Mark do a few more searches, I realized that he hadn't made one typing mistake the entire session. Considering I've probably made 4 in this sentence alone, I was extremely impressed. Again, I might have been focusing on the wrong things.

And just like that, our session was up. Mark and Steve were kind enough to take us on a tour of the rest of the house before we left, and that's when I saw the pug collection. If it's something that has pugs in it, Mark had it. Figurines, paintings, cigar cutters, oil lamps, chess sets....just shelves and shelves and shelves of stuff. Apparently the Duke and Duchess of Windsor also had a pug-themed collection, and recently sold it off through Sotheby's. Mark had taken a look through the catalog at the time, and determined that his was better by a very wide margin. Now that's saying something...I'd never seen anything like it in real life. I especially liked the pug mosaic in their backyard (the picture to the right).

Finally I climbed in the car to trek on back to San Jose. And as I sat in traffic going home, I thought about what a neat visit that was, and how I wished Pugsley was there for me to scratch.

If you're interested in participating in our Visits program (especially if you live somewhere in Central California), check out their info page.