After yesterday’s eBay announcements, there are naturally a lot of questions to be asked by sellers, mainly concerning the actual implementation of eBay’s new plans. At Insite today, some eBay employees were around to answer our questions (great timing from ChannelAdvisor!); here’s what we found out:
- Markdown Manager will still be available for 30 day BIN listings. UK law requires that the item has been on sale for 28 days at the higher price, so GTC BINs will still qualify for this.
- The new view item page will include a list of shop categories, similar if not identical to the current listing frame.
- The price of featured first may change: variable pricing by category may be considered.
- Telephone support will be available for anchor and featured shop owners, even if they are not PowerSellers.
- Listings will be more editable than they are now. Price and item description will both be editable, though title, item condition and category will not. P&P fees are probably editable, though that’s not certain yet.
This gives sellers the useful possibility that they can list multiple items at a lower price, gain sales and thus a boost in search results, before adjusting prices upwards. It won’t work as a long-term way to overprice: if you’re too expensive, that will work against you in search, and buyers will stop buying, which will also damage your search positioning. But it might be preferable to knock a couple of quid off your sale price rather than pay £145 “featured first” fee if you have a listing you want to kick-start.
If you have more questions, please leave them in a comment: we’ll do our best to get them answered.
8 Responses
The corporate greed machine keeps on churning … They killed those who made them moons ago. There are multitudes of alternatives out there. I use alsoshop.com myself and it works well for me. Due to feebays over comercialism, I have abandoned them, as they have I, and would never look back at the beast.
On price, I thought I read on Q&A that if the price is increased, the ‘sales history’ would be reset to 0 from a search point of view.
My question is whether the new BIN will allow multiple item listings for items priced less than 99p 🙂
Interesting difference of opinion, with a Pink on the PSB saying that prices can be *decreased* with no effect, but if prices are increased, sales history for BM purposes will reset to zero. I must admit, this is more what I would have expected, but it is most definitely not what was said today.
Lets see if we can get a definitive answer…
Just how editable will the description be? Is this just for fixed price or auctions as well? I don’t want to find out after I win that I bid on a completely different item that still matches with the title and category.
what 4 said
editing rather than adding description is a can of worms
Remember a month ago when eBay announced it was closing down eBay Live Auctions? There is a lawsuit against eBay filed by buyers for shill bidding and now lawsuits have been filed against eBay Live for offering a competitive edge to a few live auction sellers who may have reaped millions in revenues by using an option/tool to flood the front of eBay core categories (during the last few years). The story is being followed at https://www.legaleagles.wordpress.com
There’s much more to this story then anyone could have imagined.
looked everywhere and can not find the answer to this one
will the new 30 day bin with gtc relist with the same ebay item number,
could put an end to cross selling if it relists with a new item number
#6
does lead me to think that it will be possible to shill buy your way up the best match search ranking with a fake buying account and then a mutal npb
open to abuse i think