On the day the two week 1p fixed price technology promotion ends in the UK the US have announced a for the rest of July.
The promotion page starts with the question “Stores Sellers: Want more exposure?” suggesting “Move your Store listings to Fixed Price”. Although the 25¢ isn’t as generous as the 1p listings in the UK it does cover almost all of the eBay.com categories.
eBay are definitely embracing fixed price listings in preference to auctions as never before. With the new Best Match technology they seem confident that they can still present the best selection to buyers without being flooded either with irrelevant information or with one seller’s items hogging the first page of search results.
It’ll be very interesting to see the next pricing changes where I’d expect to see changes along similar lines to encourage sellers to list more inventory at an affordable rate.
7 Responses
Do you feel they are also trying to gradually phase shops out of the picture entirely?
Absolutely not. I think shops are crucial for sellers to be able to establish a brand on eBay, cross sell, organise products in the manner best suited for buyers, send personalised marketing to buyers and a whole host of other things.
However it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest to see the SIF format radically changed 😉
the 1p day has been a eye opener for us and hopefully ebay.
its proven to us that there are still a decent amount of buyers on ebay for us ( we had all but given up except shop before being inticed by the 1p day)
but will go back to no listings after the promo due to the cost to converstion being too high after the promo is gone.
and ebay must have enjoyed the fees increase again, i know i am not the only one to have noticed a large dip, regardless that some are doing better.
its hopefully going to show ebay that the upfront single cost and no listing fees make sense and we can all punt our shop items in the main search.
aka amazon pro seller type system.
the other thing ebay can do with modifying ifis the ammount of listing, amazon manage to allow only 1 item per seller but make all easy to find, ebay just gets carpet bombed on cheap days.
The good news is that with Best Match there will be remedies in place to prevent a seller carpet bombing a category.
First there will be limits on how many listings a seller can have displayed on a page to give all sellers and products exposure. This is said to be smart enough technology to recognise simple title changes AND to link IDs so that one seller can’t simply duplicate listings across IDs.
Secondly the Best Match technology will promote popular listings with popular being the listings with the most sales. That means if a seller has a multiple duplicate items it will actually be in their interest to have a single listings rather than carpet bomb. The more sales the seller gets from that one listing the more relevance it will be determined to have and the higher placed it’ll be in Best Match.
Those that carry on carpet bombing will be most disadvantaged in future 🙂
Cheap Listing Days work to an extent, they do increase sales but its a pain if you are a buyer having to wade through hundreds of “same” listings
A thought I had was if there was a way Ebay could reward their loyal sellers by working out the average monthly listing fees paid by a seller over the past year, say £500, and giving them say 5 times the listing ability, £2500 per month in return for the ongoing monthly fee of £500. That way you would exclude sellers who only come strong on cheap listing days, would maintain Ebay listing revenue and increase Ebay FVFs
“Absolutely not. I think shops are crucial for sellers to be able to establish a brand on eBay, cross sell, organise products in the manner best suited for buyers, send personalised marketing to buyers and a whole host of other things.”
I agree of course, but do eBay? You mention why the shops are crucial for us, but are they crucial for eBay’s changing profile in the future?
#6 Think of all the shop owners sending out email marketing to their buyers reminding them to come back to eBay….
Shops are great eBay tools that they wouldn’t be without. Don’t forget that what helps sellers sell helps eBay earn final value fees 😉