eBay have announced today the launch of a pay-per-click keyword ad program to be known as ‘eBay AdCommerce‘. Initially the program will be run as a Beta test for selected sellers on eBay.com and eBay.de, but it’s anticipated AdCommerce will be opened up to all sellers on the US and German sites by the end of the year. Currently there are no plans to expand the program to other countries.
eBay AdCommerce will enable sellers to bid on selected keywords and those that bid the highest may have an advert displayed at the bottom of search results, when a buyer searches for that keyword. Links from the adverts can only go to an eBay page – the sellers eBay shop or a particular listing.
The adverts consist of a title, a short description, and if the seller wishes an image. Similar to a Google Adwords campaign sellers can set a budget and a cost per click – they’ll only be charged when a potential buyer clicks on their advert.
Getting sellers to pay for keyword advertising is nothing new to eBay, a similar keyword program was launched on eBay.com in the summer of 2003 and retired in September 2006 due to low adoption rates.
The original program displayed adverts at the top of search results, but the new program will insert them as sponsored results beneath the main search results where Yahoo!, Google or Shopping.com adverts currently appear.
With the recent changes to selling formats and visibility from a combination of Best Match, Recent Sales and the new Featured First listing enhancement it remains to be seen if sellers are willing to pay for yet another shot at getting their products seen by buyers.
6 Responses
I’d like to think that if a buyer put in a keyword for one of my listing titles that it would appear on the search results, without having to pay extra for it to appear below the results!!
Isn’t paying to have your listings appear last the benefit of an eBay store?
eBay is out of control with there fee’s. What are they thinking of at eBay?
Fee’s Fee’s Fee’s… If they are not careful they will loose there lead over the competition with all these fees.
Good news though, There’s competition for AdCommerce, and it’s free! At least with the off site promotion of it. MyBayAds.com
-Brad
@ # 3
I checked out your site. You might want to be careful though because I don’t think you are following the rules of the API correctly. You can’t display “eBay content” publicly without the “Right now on eBay” logo.
According to eBay: The “Right Now on eBay” logo is displayed when products and services that are currently listed on eBay are displayed elsewhere on the Web. “Right Now on eBay” listings use eBay Web Services and are brought to you by eBay Affiliates or eBay Developers Program members.
The right now logo is the only logo I can use to display eBay content publicly, but I will double check with the person who Certified MyBayAds to double check.
Thank you
-Brad
I’m pretty sure I paid for my “advertising” when I paid eBay to list my items.
Now if they let it link to my website, that’s a value I might be willing to pay for.