Customer characteristics
eBay is one of the largest e-commerce companies in the world, employing approximately 35,000 people globally. The company focuses on online auctions, where nearly any product can be sold through the eBay.com platform.
In addition to traditional bidding, eBay offers a “Buy It Now” option, allowing customers to purchase items instantly at a set price. Beyond products from end users, eBay also offers goods from original manufacturers and retail chains. Payments are almost exclusively made through PayPal. eBay currently has approximately 150 million active customer accounts.
Since 2008, eBay has had a Center of Excellence in the Czech Republic, an analytical and marketing center for the European and Asian markets. The Prague branch processes marketing campaigns and conducts data analysis.
Objectives and benefits of the project
To streamline and consolidate internal processes, the Center of Excellence in Prague decided to implement a comprehensive tool for managing individual marketing requests.
Today, the process of executing a marketing campaign—from initiation to execution and evaluation—typically takes several weeks. The process involves both internal employees and external agencies across Europe. Currently, proprietary tools and email submissions are used in various teams, but there is no unified view of individual requests. The involved parties lack visibility into the status of their campaigns. Is there any delay? Are the graphic materials delivered correctly? When should I start working on my Christmas campaign? Are there enough human resources available for the campaign?
To address these needs and increase transparency across the process, the decision was made to use Jira as the foundation of the entire process. eBay globally uses Jira, making the decision straightforward.
Project implementation
Given the high demands on the user interface and the expected large number of custom attributes, it was decided at the beginning of the project that all specific customer requirements would be implemented in a separate extension plugin.
For submitting individual requests, it was necessary to program entirely new forms, along with the preparation of specific workspaces for each team.
The eBay extension plugin also implements extensive user workflows with dozens of transitions and several hundred user attributes. Marketing campaigns mainly focus on working with graphic materials (banners and marketing newsletters). These graphic materials are provided by external agencies and come with specific metadata, requiring version control. For this purpose, the file management mechanism in Jira had to be completely rewritten and extended. For accurate and optimal campaign planning, a module for human resource planning across all involved teams was implemented. To visually monitor the optimal workload of teams, JQuery graphs were added, comparing the available capacity of teams versus the calculated campaign demands.
The European marketing department has been using this modified version of Jira since July 2014. The first feedback from users has been very positive, and further extensions are planned. The entire process will gradually be enhanced with additional features and improvements, aiming to shorten the campaign execution time by approximately 30%. The Jira user plugin for eBay replaced inefficient email communication and other legacy software.
