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

eBay is an e-commerce marketplaces world leader with over 2 billion listings, in over 190 markets world wide, 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, 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 (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, 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, 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 partners pages (like Search, Item). They have 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, tracking. 
2. Unifies Search & navigation, across pages. Funnels users to right experiences without impact to performance.
3. Delivers site wide UX in weeks instead of months