eBay Global Buying Hub relaunched

eBay have launched a revamped Global Buying Hub which aims to make it easier for buyers to find items that they can purchase worldwide and have shipped to them.

This is what many sellers have been asking for for years – an eBay site where everything is available to everyone. The Global Buying Hub simply pulls every item from every eBay site into a single search displaying items that will ship to the country you’re in. Buyers are able to specify their country and also the language they’d like the buying hub to display (although item descriptions are still in the language the seller wrote them in).

Although sellers may be pleased that buyers worldwide can buy from them, the main problem is will buyers log onto the Global Buying Hub rather than their country site? I live in the UK and invariably log into eBay.co.uk and perform searches from there, I’m more likely to widen my search term or search title and description than I am to think of the Global Buying Hub.

eBay have had little success with diverting buyers from country sites or attracting new customers to eBay Express. Although many of the features of Express have been integrated into the core sites as a standalone site it just didn’t work. The Global Buying Hub is another great idea, but without a prominent link from the search results page inviting buyers to expand their search internationally it’s also unlikely to become buyers eBay site of choice.

eBay have said that they’re doing additional advertising and marketing to get your items exposure and unlike core sites where sellers have to pay for International Site Visibility there is no additional charge for listings in the Global Buying Hub.

To ensure your products are automatically included in the Global Buying Hub for buyers in countries that you ship to, you need to specify the shipping costs to those countries when you list your item. Ensuring buyers search the Global Buying Hub is out of sellers control and it’s success will be down to eBay.