Univers. Render & Header Platform at eBay: Drives Engagement, Streamlines Navigation & Accelerates product agility

eBay is an e-commerce marketplace world leader with over 2 billion listings, in over 190 markets worldwide, connecting millions of buyers and sellers, through the use of technology, thereby providing economic opportunity to grow and thrive.

Damodaran solved 3 major challenges faced by eBay:
1. How to render, and deliver targeted UX (surfaced at specific points during a customer's journey) which could be served on any eBay screen or page, device agnostic, fully de-coupled from the product pages?
2. How to unify the Search, Header, and Navigation experience dependably with lesser hardware, in a micro-services and micro-frontends environment?
3. How the current timeline of launching site-wide and targeted UX (a few months across pages, screens & devices) be improved?

Solution:
- #1 was solved by the Universal Render platform and #2 by the Header & Navigation platform. Both are eBay’s firsts in terms of a horizontal UX platform as a service.
- #1 powers site-wide and targeted UX such as promotional coupons and social widget sign-in, ads, marketing campaigns, informational messages, guidance banners, and educative tooltips, to name some.
- #2 powers the search and navigation experience, the shopping cart, item watchlist, user notifications, and >10 headless modules like co-browse, tracking, experimentation, and site-wide scripts (non-visual but required for essential functioning).

Prior to these, delivering site-wide targeted UX wasn't seamless. Every page had its technology stack. Interfacing with each was a herculean effort. The impact of the header and navigation failing was costly as users wouldn't be able to sign in, search and navigate, access the shopping cart, or view notifications.

Both achieve decoupled releases without dependencies on partner pages (like Search, and Item). They have a 95th percentile response time of <50ms. 
With this, eBay now
1. Delivers targeted UX anywhere, across pages —search, payments, etc., based on a wide gamut of business rules, priorities, rendering modes with experimentation, and tracking. 
2. Unifies Search & navigation, across pages. Funnels users to the right experiences without impact on performance.
3. Delivers site-wide UX in weeks instead of months