eBay’s mentions in passing that free eBay-hosted pictures are to be made available to the Homes & Gardens category. This offer had already been announced for Clothes, Shoes and Accessories.
Sellers including Gallery Plus, . eBay have promised a “new zoom feature” later in the year, but the real advantage to using eBay-hosted images is that sellers can show multiple images near the top of the listing.
The offer, with eBay’s comment that
If you currently host your photos somewhere other than eBay, now is a great time to start moving them over to eBay Picture Services (EPS)
has led some sellers to speculate that the company may be considering disallowing self-hosted pictures in future. For the moment, though, this is purely speculation.
8 Responses
disallowing self-hosted pictures? No way,…..
O, interesting. Thx.
“may be considering disallowing self-hosted pictures in future”
No way will this ever happen – there is too big an industry outside of eBay, providing services for eBay sellers, and many of those services are dependant on image hosting to get and maintain a user base.
#4 They’re already limiting what sellers (and third parties) can do with the iframe in the new listing template. Plus there’s now an enormous amount of required information (P&P, Returns, Despatch time etc) required in eBay section that used to be in sellers templates. I can see them becoming more and more restrictive in the future and it really wouldn’t surprise me…
#4 It wouldn’t surprise me either, infact pretty sure it will happen…why would eBay give a stuff about upsetting some picture hosting firms?
It’s not as if they gave much of a stuff about the third party tool providers when they changed the affiliate commission system.
Nor are they obliged to, unless by becoming more restrictive they shoot themselves in the foot by affecting sales or sale prices (thereby reducing their own take).
Thinking about it further: if pictures on eBay itself (rather than elsewhere and susceptible to untracked change) increase buyer confidence then it could be win-win for eBay and sellers, even if it might be lose for tp providers.
It must be because of the home and gardening season for summer.
They must be focusing on this area of their business which most are at this time of year.