Online shopping stopped being a curiosity a long time ago and is now embedded firmly in the modern lifestyle. How can you tell? Because ecommerce websites are starting to experiment with new and different formats to stay ahead of the game. You usually don’t experiment unless you’re happy that a solid foundation exists, and yes it’s probably called Amazon.

The latest example is Rummage, which has taken the dowdy old eBay site and dumped it into a fancy new Pinterest type template, full of lovely looking boxes, pop up images and a gorgeous interface with social networking icons built in. Does it improve eBay? Well kinda. It’s great using a perpetual scrolling page full of images instead of the slightly dated eBay page full of garble, but I’m not sure that it makes it any easier to make a purchase decision.

Or maybe that’s just because we’re conditioned to be happy eBay users? At the end of the day with Rummage there’s still an additional click needed to actually buy something, which could be problematical. The one major area in which I can see this interface being valuable is with newcomers, who will probably love the simplicity of pictures instead of jumble, but for experienced users it’s probably going to be a bit of a turnoff.

Still let’s not be churlish, it’s a great effort, and the work the developers have done is really top class and to be applauded. All I have to do now is remember to add it to my list of useful bookmarks and click that instead of punching in ebay.com. Hmm…