EBay Hires Ex-Yahoo Exec Don Bradford to Head Up Social

Ebay has hired Don Bradford to fill a new position at the company in charge of leading its social commerce efforts.

As the VP of social at eBay, Bradford will head up one of the company’s four main focus areas that it identified earlier this year. In addition to social, the other three areas are mobile, local and digital payments.

While most of those areas have already been accounted for through recent acquisitions, including Milo and Where–and eBay’s PayPal division–social was mostly unspoken for.

We are hearing that Bradford started at the company on Monday and will be reporting to Dane Glasgow, eBay’s VP of global product management. A company spokesperson declined to comment.

While it’s a unclear what Bradford will be working on exactly, the e-commerce company has been experimenting with some social projects, including group gifts, which makes it easy for multiple individuals to collectively chip in to pay for a gift for someone else.

Bradford is known for being a long-term Microsoft employee, having left only seven months ago to join Yahoo. At Microsoft, he worked on Bing’s user interface team in Mountain View, Calif., and previously worked on Microsoft Live Search communities and MSN Hotmail.

In October, he joined Yahoo as VP of Communities as engineering lead for Answers, Address Book, Delicious, Flickr, Groups, Koprol, Meme and Pulse, according to LinkedIn.

Bradford will be based in San Jose.