The have lit up with the news that hundreds of thousands of suprious listings appeared on the eBay.com over the weekend.
User names such as sdc_prod_9124_14 with some 48,000 eBay listings appeared, although currently all the listings appear to have been removed. SDC is the acronym for shopping.com, the shopping comparison site owned by eBay.
The listings had no bid/bin links, simply a link to add to watched items leading so speculation that eBay are using them to increase listing numbers. A more rational explanation is that some one made an error in launching Shopping.com listings onto eBay and the error was swiftly reversed.
In all cases I’ve been able to find the items that appeared on eBay are still valid Shopping.com listings. An example is the screen shot Auctionbytes captured, the Olympus Evolt E10 Starter Kit listed on eBay under the user sdc_prod_301013_74 is still available to view on Shopping.com. Links in the eBay item description confirmed it belonged to The Twister Group who listed the product on Shopping.com.
It’s known that at least 212,000 listings appeared across a dozen eBay User IDs, in comparison to the 12 – 13 million listings on eBay.com at any one time the influx of Shopping.com listings represent just over 1.6% of the total listings on the site.
6 Responses
Chris, it’s likely that it was a slip-up. There have been discussions about integrating SDC listings into to eBay for awhile. These listings would not have shown up on eBay.com in the form that they did if eBay hadn’t set them up this way. So I would say it was a slip-up before a test. Eventually we will see SDC listing on the main platform.
I agee with you that it wasn’t eBay trying to inflate listing numbers.
Damn!!! Its so much more fun to spend night and day coming up with conspiracies on what ebay has done to offset the *massive* “boycott”
“Some Shopping.com listings appeared accidentally on eBay.com over the past two days. This system issue has been resolved.”
Such a prosaic explanation! Why couldn’t I have been proven wrong and it be a conspiracy? 😛
Well, if you want a conspiracy, how about “this was just a glitch when they were testing a software change that one day *will* dump the entire contents of SDC onto eBay”? 😀
Interestingly, an eBay spokesperson apparently told Auctionbytes it was a “test which has run its course”. Have at it with the conspiracy theories.