Driving Revenue Growth & Performance

Challenge Overcome

In the fast-paced eBay marketplace, ensuring a positive user experience and maximizing revenue hinges on preventing shoppers from landing on out-of-stock product pages. The company aimed to drastically reduce these frustrating experiences, initially targeting a 5% reduction in such page views. With over 500 million products processed daily and peak query volumes reaching 10,000–20,000 per second, eBay needed a highly efficient solution. Key challenges included avoiding rate limits within the shopping ads Content API during product information updates and managing massive data streams with hourly updates to maintain real-time accuracy.

Approach Taken

eBay started by implementing shopping ads best practices. It developed an efficient, high-volume SKU update system with prioritization logic, and it established regular feed processing schedules integrated with the Content API. A key innovation was adding a data-streaming approach for active listings, using the Content API with a 5% click limit to enable dynamic updates and minimize clicks on unavailable products.

eBay partnered with Incubeta to optimize its Google Cloud architecture and streamline product feed processing and ingestion into shopping ads.

Value Delivered

eBay’s strategic approach yielded significant results, dramatically reducing expired clicks approaching the initial 5% target across the key European markets of Germany, France, Italy, and the UK. The impact was particularly pronounced in the UK with a 72% reduction in expired clicks and Germany with a 51% decrease. Beyond improving user experience, this initiative also drove significant business growth, including a 256% click increase, a 147% sales increase, and a 137% revenue increase.