The eBay Etsy promotion was a co-branded promotional website created for a cross-marketing effort between eBay and Etsy, two large online marketplace platforms. The project was a consulting engagement with Tenthwave, a New York-based digital agency that managed the promotional account.
The site's front-end design was intentionally kept straightforward — HTML and CSS formed the structural and presentational core, appropriate for a focused promotional page that needed to communicate the campaign's message clearly without distraction. A light JavaScript layer using jQuery was added for interactivity, including a custom thumbnail image slideshow plugin. The slideshow provided visual engagement within the promotional content without requiring a heavy front-end framework.
The back end was a custom application built by the Tenthwave team in Java Spring MVC. Spring MVC is an enterprise-grade Java web framework commonly used at digital agencies working with large clients, providing a structured MVC approach to handling requests, managing application logic, and rendering templated views. The front-end code was integrated into the Spring MVC template system for server-side rendering.
Cross-brand promotional sites require care in managing the visual balance between two distinct brands — in this case, eBay's and Etsy's identities needed to coexist within the promotional context without one brand's visual language overwhelming the other. The design approach, delivered by Tenthwave's creative team, navigated this constraint while the front-end implementation translated those specifications into functional HTML and CSS.
