Dive Brief:

• EBay’s CEO Devin Wenig Wednesday outlined some of the company’s turnaround plans at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Media conference in San Francisco, reports Fortune.

• The plan continues its shift from an auction site to more of a marketplace selling new as well as used goods, more often at a fixed price.

• It involves providing shoppers with more product reviews, better search capabilities, and more data and other tools to aid sellers.

Dive Insight:

As Fortune notes, Wenig’s plans for eBay make it sound a lot like Amazon, minus Amazon’s superior search capabilities and expanding fulfillment capacity. Amazon also boasts an enormous assortment that is more complicated on eBay because of its many sellers. In other words, as many retailers have found, being more like Amazon is a tall order.

Wenig Wednesday positioned eBay’s strength as also being its toughest task.

“The brilliance of eBay’s model is its greatest challenge,” Wenig said, according to Fortune. “It’s a friction free marketplace, which means sellers can sell anything they want, and that makes it complicated.”

Wenig also said that the company is working to improve its search results via Google, which suffered in 2014 and into last year when changes were made to Google’s search engine. EBay’s response to the changes may have cost the marketplace some $200 million as searches failed to drive traffic. 

Wenig, who took the reins last after the announcement of the marketplace’s split from payment unit PayPal, said then that employing structured data would be a top priority and the only way to solve the site’s issues with search optimization. He reiterated that there will be continuing improvements.

“There’s going to be a few great e-commerce companies and eBay will be in one of those,” he said in San Francisco Wednesday, according to Fortune.