eBay have announced this morning that Gallery Plus will be available for Stores listings. Gallery Plus allows a larger picture to pop up when buyers mouse-over a normal Gallery picture: in effect, it allows them to preview a listing without needing to click into it. As a listing enhancement, it’s obviously attractive, and yet it remains incredibly under-utilised, something I can only put down to the fact that on .com, it costs an outrageous 75c a listing. I’ve rarely seen it outside super-high ticket categories like Motors, but when it’s used, it really does help sellers to stand out from the crowd.
And that’s why putting GP in Stores is almost incomprehensible. In your Store, you’re only competing with yourself, so why pay out for Gallery Plus? The fact that it makes browsing a little bit easier for buyers is not going to convince many sellers to send their Stores insertion fees soaring through the roof.
eBay should have grabbed their opportunity here to sell the idea of Gallery Plus. The fee for adding it to Stores listings should have been 5c or 10c maximum: in fact, why not upgrade Stores’ Gallery to Gallery Plus for free? The sooner you get sellers used to seeing those nice big pop up pictures in Stores, the easier it’ll be to sell them GP on core listings for the hiked price. Better still, you make Stores a more attractive proposition without having to reverse any of last year’s FVF increase.
Of course, in the UK Gallery Plus costs an even more outrageous 95p a listing. Normally I end these sort of posts with plea to eBay to launch this .com-only upgrade in the UK as well, but I think I can promise them that at that price, the take-up amongst shop owners would be barely worth getting the engineers to implement it.
What do you think? If you’re a shop owner, would you use Gallery Plus? Do you use it already? Leave us a comment.
3 Responses
Great if your selling higher priced items (probably)
but as usual it’s just another nail in the coffin of fees vs viability to sellers of lower priced items.
Given the lower traffic levels its just fleabay being greedy & shooting itself in the foot once more.
You might think with all those high salaried business minds slurping lates all day at the towers, they might realise that to attract more buyers they need to make the ‘experience’ more attractive to sellers – and especially those of lower value SIF items, after all they would only boost the released overall figures with such an incentive.
If they ever got round to changing the overall pricing structure on a meaningful basis the day no doubt would be to late.
My items are not normally in the price bracket to allow a profitable use of any expensive enhancements. I find it hard to understand why ebay charge such high amounts for enhancements that can only ultimately result in higher prices, ergo higher FVFs for them.
You’re right there, I think gallery should be free for ALL listings, but I fail to see why anyone would use Featured in Search (shows up in shop searches) or Gallery Plus on a SIF listing. Quite frankly if the buyer is already in your shop you have promo boxes which are free to use, and hardly any buyers use shops search in comparison to core search – being featured in a search no one uses isn’t that attractive!