How eBay Built a Unified Content Platform Using CrafterCMS

One of CrafterCMS’s hallmarks, compared to other headless CMS solutions, is that it is one of the most highly customizable solutions available. CrafterCMS enables developers to not only build any type of front-end user experience for site visitors, but also easily customize the authoring experience to optimize content creation and publishing productivity. This is all in addition to CrafterCMS's highly scalable, secure, and high performance architecture for large scale website and global e-commerce applications.

As a global commerce leader connecting millions of buyers and sellers in over 190 markets worldwide, eBay needed a powerful platform that was easily customizable in order to create a highly productive authoring experience for their content teams. In this recap from CrafterCMS Live! 2025, we highlight on how eBay uses CrafterCMS as their enterprise-wide, unified headless content platform for eBay.com and all other digital channels. 

The eBay Global Marketplace

eBay has been a leader in the global commerce space for over thirty years, facilitating C2C and B2C transactions in over 190 markets. It has over 134 million active buyers worldwide and over 2.3 billion active listings. 

Given the number of diverse use cases required for such a marketplace, the eBay team tries to build solutions that are easily reusable and applicable to global standards. For this, they opted to deploy a unified content platform that was customized to their unique requirements. 

Building a Unified Content Platform for ebay.com

eBay’s unified content platform is a built on top of the headless CrafterCMS platform that serves all of their content authors and developers. As CrafterCMS completely decouples content authoring and delivery, the eBay team can use single sign-on (SSO) to enable both content authors and developers to access the authoring system.

On the one hand, content authors can create, edit, approve, and publish any content and rich experiences built via the platform. Meanwhile, developers can build components, launch sites, and deploy custom solutions using Groovy scripts that is natively supported by CrafterCMS. 

Additionally, CrafterCMS’s ability to separate concerns means that the eBay team can launch complex customizations while maintaining a lightweight integration within this UCP infrastructure and move the workflows or complex logic to a separate system to avoid complicating the platform’s business logic.

The unified content platform supports both web and native applications, built on REST APIs for creating and running content-rich digital experiences. It also offers a sync mechanism between clusters that ensures content updates are reflected across instances.

Crafter Studio (the CrafterCMS authoring UI) helps keep these technicalities hidden from content authors. Additionally, the eBay UCP enables several other use cases, including search and page navigation capabilities, and integration with eBay’s internal CDN and their internal digital asset management solution. 

Global Multi-channel Content Authoring 

As a global marketplace, eBay needs to support content authors from multiple time zones, including Eastern Standard Time and Central European Time. This means they need high reliability and excellent stability with a minimal support required. 

Content Authoring Efficiency

With content authors creating content all day long, improvements that seem small can make a huge difference. This includes organizing and optimizing content models, and they benefit from the Crafter Studio UI that reduces clicks and context switches and easily brings common data sources and tools into Crafter Studio.

As UCP continues to evolve to support multiple use cases, eBay leverages features like in-context editing and the ability to reuse components to ensure complete content authoring efficiency and make content authors’ lives easier. A high level of content velocity is critical at eBay.

Authoring Customizations

The eBay team has also introduced several authoring customizations to make the platform more efficient and user-friendly, including:

• Project-specific, Crafter Studio UI optimizations.
• Inter-project smart copy for internationalization.
• Automated image transformations.
• Integration with eBay's internal digital asset management (DAM) system.

One of the most noteworthy customizations is the eBay Picture Service (EPS) API. This is eBay’s media platform for uploading and managing images, and includes a custom plugin built on CrafterCMS's plugin framework. Through CrafterCMS’s flexible architecture, the eBay team easily creates reusable plugins to accelerate development and minimize maintenance time. 

Wrapping Up

In their talk at CrafterCMS Live! 2025, engineering manager Karpagam Balasubramaniam and software engineer Sparsh Samir share how CrafterCMS empowers eBay’s global, multi-channel content teams while delivering a world-class e-commerce experience for customers.

Want to learn more? Watch the entire recorded session and see how eBay leverages CrafterCMS as their universal content platform.