• The Wall Street Journal, Monday, November 1, 2010 12:22 PM

Later this week, eBay plans to unveil its first major homepage redesign in nearly four years, The Wall Street Journal reports. According to The Journal, the move is part of an "urgent effort to close a technology gap that has caused the onetime Web pioneer to lag behind rivals like Amazon.com," which, "for years has had many of the same features that eBay is adding."

Admitting as much, eBay CEO John Donahoe tells The Journal: "One of the most important things we had to do was become more of a technology-driven company." By Donahoe's own reckoning, eBay is only about halfway through some major technological goals, "such as building a product catalog for the millions of products sold on eBay," as The Journal notes. eBay's new home page will offer recommendations based on previous searches, and feature a list of the popular items. Recently, shoppers looking for DVDs or MP3 players might have noticed a single page for each model of a product -- which represents an effort consolidate the sometimes thousands of different listings by sellers.

Read the whole story at The Wall Street Journal »