eSnipe launched in 1999 as a free service to place bids the last few seconds of eBay auction (experienced eBay users call this practice sniping). It has been running continuously since. I was an eBay user who purchased eSnipe in December 2000 in the dark days of the first dotcom crash, then started charging for its main service on June 1 of the following year. eSnipe has been profitable every quarter since–longer than Amazon.
From the beginning I have wanted eSnipe’s design to be great, but “great” is literally in the eye of the beholder. When those beholders pay your bills by trusting you with not only their money but their eBay bids, you get flexible about “great”. It turns out that the users and I agree to disagree about good design. That, and I got lazy.
I am a second-rate web designer and have always known it. I can also say with a straight face that while I know this to be true, my first revision to the eSnipe design was its most popular. The eSnipe creator and first designer was a delightful gentleman from the corporate world whose strength was in innovation more than graphic design. His logo for eSnipe was more literal-minded than many users liked, and bore a stylized gunsight, which drew a number of complaints from gun-haters.
eSnipe's First Logo
Gun hate Triggers eSnipe 2.0
No need to alienate them. In 2000 we spent $150 or so to have a logo designed by a gent in Romania. At this time the Nike swoosh was a massive force in commercial design. Everyone was imitating it, Amazon included, and I figured in a few years swooshes would look as dated as those crazy trapezoid shapes from the 1950s, so my one requirement was: no swoosh.
Our one requirement: No swooshes!:
It had not one, not two, but… three swooshes. We went with it anyway. I was out $150 and didn’t want to waste any more money or time. eSnipe was self-funded and therefore particularly risky. Hint: not all spouses take these ventures with complete equanimity, especially when you’re eating into the retirement fund. I was working out of my basement while taking care of very young children. Extra swooshes were pretty low on my priority list.
Meanwhile, you design a site around the logo, and I took this task on myself. The site was pretty small at that time. I like shiny things, but I often don’t like to take care of them. I did a few high visibility pages, then waved my hands ineffectually at the rest.
This left Stephen, our brilliant and scrupulous programmer at that time, to finish up the things I didn’t care about, like the screens used to take your money or to present your bids (the My Auctions page). In other words… the really important pages. The ones users care about most got the least attention from me.
Because here’s the thing. Once they join, few of our users ever return the home page. Instead, they bookmark My Auctions. They normally don’t revisit the home page unless the login expires or they snipe from someone else’s computer. I should have been more more careful about those ergonomics. Stephen put a great deal of attention into the workflow, and I should have given the look of the interior that kind of devotion.
Anyway, we got precious few complaints on the new design. Many more people told me how much they liked the new look. I was secretly impressed with myself. “Secretly” may be a little strong. I told people for years, including new designers, that I was the most popular designer eSnipe ever had. It will always be technically true: my design received the smallest number of complaints, and therefore the highest complaint/compliment ratio in our history. As you can see… well, I’ll keep my day job.
eSnipe Post-Triple-Swoosh Redesign
Sort of has that Google no design design. No pictures other than the logo, because images consume far more bandwidth than words. Web servers were expensive then. Throughput was hugely important. eSnipe has always been a very busy site, and we didn’t want to waste time sending graphics down the wire when we could use those same resources placing bids.
(The technical among you will immediately see that on a busy site those jobs should be done by different servers using different priorities and possibly even different server software. Yes, yes, and yes. Stephen was ahead of you. But at that time we had somewhat limited resources and it was hard enough just to find high-performance servers at a reasonable price in those days.)
eSnipe made good coin from the day we started charging, which surprised me more than anyone. As new users came onboard, it sort of felt incumbent on me to make the site appear more businesslike. eBay users are canny and suspicious when it comes to trusting their personal information to sites other than eBay.
This was true even in the early years of eBay’s acquisition of PayPal. For years afterward, our users pressured us to create a competing payment system. I believe this is less a reflection on PayPal, which has been nothing but win for eSnipe, and more on the users’ innate nervousness at sharing the most private of information with an uninvited third party.
eSnipe 3.0 is Bank
The next redesign was meant to give the appearance of solidity and trustworthiness. For the next phase we hired Clifton Karnes, the brilliant industrial and graphic designer. He gave me a page-long questionnaire about what I wanted the design to be. I hate paperwork. I completed the survey not because he’s expensive, which he is, but because Clif’s a rocking designer whom I respect greatly.
The questionnaire was a game-changer. It forced me to think about my brand and how I wanted it to appear to people in ways I would have taken years to discover myself. I was not without firm requirements going in. Three things I knew ahead of time without the questionnaire:
1. The new logo should look good in only 1 color (back then, print costs were high and I thought offline efforts or even business cards might use this requirement)
2. It should look timeless. I want this logo to look great in 100 years, like the handwritten Coke logo.
3. Please. No swoosh.
eSnipe logo circa 2002
Clif did characteristically well on #1 and #2. As far as #3, well, you can’t always get what you want.
What is it with graphic designers and swooshes?
I let Clif get away with it, because this was really a damn good swoosh. It didn’t have the tacked-on feeling as the our first one, which is somehow the most static-looking swoosh in the rich and varied history of swooshes, even though it was actually triplets.
Clif was clever, too, in bringing back the crosshairs almost subliminally as the dot over the “i”. I’m pretty sure no gun-hating customers ever made that connection. As far as I can recall no one complained about its subtle return.
Sometime in 2002 or 2003 Clif’s logo, which we kept secret, was used as the kernel of the site redesign. Clif gave me another survey. This time I filled it out with care and anticipation. The goals for this redesign were (roughly from memory):
• Be inviting
• Engender trust
• Clean graphic appearance
• Flexible layout for news stories
• Low bandwidth
The “trust” thing was huge. Few people know that eSnipe is the first site to make a micropayment system profitable, but also one of the very first sites to requirement payment for its services and survive past initial funding. I told Clif I wanted eSnipe to feel as trustworthy as a bank’s website. The reason was simple. People were understandably very nervous giving money to websites, far more then than they are now. We were one of the first self-provisioned automated payment systems, meaning that users didn’t have to wait for us to approve a credit card charge.
Oh, and one more thing. Our users are eBay users.
eBay users live in an immersive, sharply defined, focused, and constantly exciting world. Finding an item you’ve sought for years, seeing its current price (invariably either suspiciously low or disappointingly high), monitoring it over the days as bids come in, the lurch in your gut when you win the auction (what brilliant terminology! Not complete the auction; not execute a successful bid; not make your purchase, but…. win!): even after 11 years it’s always a roller-coaster ride for me.
From what I can tell, maybe eBay doesn’t even understand how very much they’ve become a part of the zeitgeist. I know I do, because when someone’s bid gets jammed up somewhere, we hear about it. Regardless of whether it’s pilot error, problem remembering a password, eBay’s bidding algorithm, or change in IP address that makes eBay suspicious, it’s our fault. When you lose a bid for the ‘76 Fender Stratocaster you’ve been waiting on for the last 12 years, you will vent to our support.
When you do, you’ll get a personal reply, because that’s how eSnipe rolls. Doesn’t matter if you are angry because the problem is that you changed your password on eBay but forgot to update it with us, we file a support ticket and work it through until resolution.
eSnipe works by duplicating your eBay login process, then bidding shortly before the end of the auction. eBay won’t let sniping companies use its API, so we are responsible for maintaining lists of usernames and passwords. eBay users regard their accounts as something slightly less valuable than children and slightly more than world peace.
eBay represents something far more than just another online store to many of its customers. Many of them pour a substantial portion of their lives to the hobby or avocation or vocation or schooling or whatever it represents to them. eBay is the only place many of them can find what they’re looking for. Sellers, or buyers of high-ticket goods, also have a reputation to uphold in the form of eBay feedback.
Entrusting their passwords and usernames with us, then, means exposing some of their most important secrets to a third party. Managing their account information is a humbling and scary undertaking. So that’s why I wanted the site to look like a bank–or at least feel as trustworthy as a bank’s website.
Here’s what Clif rolled out.
eSnipe Redesign 2003
Made mine look like it was the product of a rank amateur, which it was. Now is that look banky or what? Banky is just what the doctor ordered. As eSnipe got bigger, many of the charms of being a smaller site, like the in-joke name or homemade look, lost their appeal as the eBay community grew.
The more eSnipe looked like a bank, I reasoned, the more users who weren’t certain about purchasing would take the plunge. It didn’t hurt that we offer a 30-day money back guarantee regardless of the auction results.
Clif’s site redesign also got a ton of complaints, far more than mine.
That was good news. It meant our user base had grown substantially. I ignored the complaints for a number of reasons. Many people hate change, and who should expect it more than pioneer web purchasers working with a relatively unknown business? I expected people to dislike it, and that they’d get used to it. We did get a few compliments, but many, many less than complaints.
I kept Clif’s design. First off, it was fantastic. Clif is a great designer. The complaints said much more about people’s need to keep eSnipe stable than it did about his mad skilz as a designer. I also had no other choice. The redesign was costly, it improved the site’s efficiency and it gave us room to grow.
I did consider testing it, but liked the result enough to deploy. Hey, I’m an entrepreneur, right? Of course I do things by the seat of my pants. Plus, at that time there just weren’t the kind of easy testing mechanisms that a site like SurveyMonkey now provides at rock-bottom prices.
eSnipe 4.0 Hits the Ground Running! After 7 Years
Scores of users visit eSnipe for the first time every day and sign up as users. This is pretty impressive. We do not advertise. All these signups are due to word of mouth, and of course every eSnipe user has a vested interest in keeping others out of the club. Think about it: if you get better deals because of eSnipe, at least part of the reason is that other buyers in your area of interest are not sophisticated enough to snipe their eBay bids. More snipers means less chance of your own sniping having the same impact. That’s the theory, anyway. In practice we represent only a fraction of 1% of eBay users, so feel free to spread the word.
New signups in the last couple of years have stabilized, even pulled back a little. This year I plan to do some advertising. If I advertise, I need to make my site look like it was designed, oh, I don’t know, some time in the 21st century. People to whom eSnipe is recommended probably won’t pay too much attention to its now somewhat dated appearance.
The connection is far weaker when they land on our home page via an ad. People who get advertised to are just looking for an excuse to move on, and with good reason. A site that takes your money should give the appearance of strength and modernity. We thought it necessary to update the look.
Besides, please. Seven years? Lame.
First thing we did was go to 99Designs to have our logo updated. 99Designs is a website where designers will create a logo for you on spec in a contest format. They get paid only if you choose a winner. Seems suicidal to me from the standpoint of a designer, but as a consumer I’m thrilled.
There were dozens of submissions. Many were less than inspired. A few were brilliant. The final list of entries looked like this. I chose as the winner one that was pretty close to the original but with a modern facade:
eSnipe 2010 logo
As I’ve learned over the years, revising the logo is a little dangerous. We want something that looks modern to prospective customers yet won’t repel existing users. I think the results are excellent. The contest was ably managed by Oxstein Labs, about whom much more will come in a future post.
Because I love the existing logo and updating it felt somehow very personal, I didn’t really open this contest up to the public, though I welcomed internal discussion (and ignored dissent, of course). The Oxstein crew felt that the home page redesign should get a vote from our audience, I agreed.
And good thing, too, because our audience chose a design I didn’t favor. I get a little credit, though, because I predicted to the crew that it may turn out to be the winner. Here’s what the new eSnipe home page will look like.
eSnipe 2010 Redesign Winner
It was not my first choice. The design I favored strongly, one of 5 entrants in our audience survey, was the one shown next. It scored 20% in the audience survey, vs, 37.5% for the winner above:
Runner Up to eSnipe Redesign award
In Presidential election terms, that gap of 17.5% would be a landslide victory. The results of the survey gave me a number of valuable pieces of information:
1. I don’t know jack about my users.
2. I should have surveyed them on the logo redesign.
3. Very good artists are available at excellent prices, and you need to collaborate with them to get what you want. Or get Oxstein Labs to work with them, which I like even more.
4. The people at Oxstein Labs are incredibly smart and know this stuff cold.
Next on our list: internal page designs like My Auctions, tutorials, and making purchases. This time, I won’t punt on them. We have half a million registered users, and I no longer get to improvise the way I used to.
