Giving eBay’s smart chatbot a voice.
It’s not every day a Fortune 500 company asks you to be the voice of their chatbot. How could I say no?
Developing ShopBot inside eBay’s experimental division, N, exposed me to rare opportunities, developing audience research questions and methods with our in-house analytics teams, working with product and R&D teams, and regular brainstorms with the CPO.
After developing a thorough product personality and voice guide, I moved on to other opportunities inside N. Facebook Messenger has since largely deprecated their chatbot function, and sunsetted with it.
ShopBot showed up in your Facebook Messenger list alongside your friends, so while it still needed to sound like a shopping expert, it also needed to be casual.
When Snapchat Spectacles were impossible to find, we hid ten inside eBay ShopBot for finders to win. This was one of the prize packages.
We developed a guerrilla marketing campaign that showed how any picture can start your shopping journey.
ShopBot homepage. RIP.