eBay Australia have landed a real coup – auctions for the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition. Also on offer are flights with Quantas with a choice of four options that include domestic and international, economy and business class airfares. Gaining worldwide publicity for the charity they’re supporting there is one thing they’ve forgotten – helping people find their listings
They’ve committed the number one faux pas with auctions that even the greenest eBay seller would avoid: auction titles that don’t include relevant keywords.
The auction for the date with the Prime Minister doesn’t include his name – John Howard, nor the words “Prime Minister”. The title is “Mid Winter Ball – Prime Ministerial Package“. Searching for “Prime Minister” does not bring up “Prime Ministerial”, the only way to find the auction is searching for “Prime Minister*” and not too many people include wild cards in their searches.
The other two auction titles are just as bad – “Mid Winter Ball – Inside the Leadership Challenge” for a date with the Labour Opposition Leader, Kevin Rudd and “Mid Winter Ball – Spirit of Australia QANTAS Pack” which at least includes the name Quantas but fails to include “Flights”, “Tickets” or any other associated words people may search for.
With the publicity surrounding the auctions potential bidders will be logging on to eBay Australia looking for the listings and there isn’t even a link to eBay for Charity in Australia on the home page. To be fair eBay for Charity hasn’t been properly launched in Australia in the same way as the UK and US, but for auctions of such high profile some home page coverage would make sense.
A final point is that all three auctions commit site interference as they’ve changed the fonts outside the auction description area. I’m sure that GoingGone who are running the auctions are well aware of eBay rules and policies. The mistakes in these listings are nothing new for eBay Australia and GoingGone, earlier this month they auctioned a dress worn by Nicole Kidman without her name in the title, although they did add it as a subtitle.
The auctions will benefit the Burn Foundation Australia which is dedicated to making a difference to the lives of burn survivors and their families. This is a great opportunity to raise significant sums of money for them and the auctions run for the next ten days, there’s still plenty of time to get your bids in. 🙂
4 Responses
Though arguably, when half your country’s press is reporting on said auctions, keywords aren’t that desperate anyway 😀
There’s no link to the auctions in any of the articles I’ve seen :-(. If people want to find em they’ll log on to eBay and start searching and won’t find them. They’ll hit the same problems I did…. search for “Prime Minister”… search for “John Howard”…. search for “Kevin Rudd”…..
None of the terms you’d expect to search for will help you. I mean for goodness sake the auction for the Prime Minister doesn’t even mention his name in the description 😮
Ouch.
Maybe he’s in the same position as Tony Blair and might be gone by the time the auction ends 😀