The Helpful eBay Toolbar
Across the top of any window you look at in eBay is the eBay toolbar. The eBay site is very insistent on not hiding anything from its users and makes every function of what it does available in the eBay toolbar. Any service you need to sell or buy anything on eBay can get started with a function in the eBay toolbar. Once you click on a selection from the eBay toolbar you will be given an extensive drop down menu of options that can take you to just about any service you could ever need in eBay. It is unique because until eBay came along the fully functioning toolbar was reserved for the web browser only. The toolbar on any website you were navigating was never as extensive as the toolbar on your browser which became a navigation nightmare as more sights started to get complex. The initial programming rule was less is more on the front-page toolbar. Then eBay changed all of that and put their functionality on their eBay toolbar because they believed that the customer should have everything right at their fingertips on the very first page. The eBay toolbar changed how websites treat navigation and it is just one of the many Internet innovations that eBay pioneered on their way to becoming one of the giants of Internet commerce.
The eBay toolbar makes eBay so much easier to navigate that it became one of the main attractions to new users becoming familiar with eBay and the Internet. The eBay toolbar uses plain language instructions that allow any person to navigate the site whether they are familiar with the inner workings of the Internet or not. Once again it showed that anyone can use the Internet and that many people wanted to use the Internet, the only thing stopping them was understanding how to use it. The eBay toolbar went a long way to creating that bridge between the novice user and the Internet and it was a bridge that opened up the floodgates for Internet usage.
Now You Can Make It Part Of Your Browser
Now you can load a version of the eBay toolbar onto your personal web browser. It is a condensed toolbar but it still allows you the basic functionality necessary to get on to eBay and manage your account. Once again eBay was one of the first companies to offer this browser add-on and it paved the way to many other browser products from other companies such as Yahoo.
The eBay site is responsible for many of the innovations that made the Internet accessible to just about everyone. The eBay toolbar is a great example of one of those important innovations.
