eBay shop owners in the US are up in arms about what’s perceived as lower visibility for eBay.com stores. eBay are due to remove two Stores promotions from the search results page today – removing the “Get More Results module” at the bottom of search results which will be reduced to a “See additional items from eBay Stores” text link and removing entirely the “Matching eBay Stores” module from the left sidebar.
Removing the graphics used to build these modules will result in faster page 
loads and eBay say that . They also say that they don’t see many clicks to these two sections of the search result pages so impact should be minimal.
In the mean time many UK sellers are still sore at losing the Shops tab from the top of eBay pages. Personally I think there’s less justification for keeping that page element – On eBay UK there are no Shop Inventory Format (SIF) listings left, every item is in main search. There really is no need to direct buyers to a shops search to reveal additional items when every item is visible in the main site search. That’s not the case on eBay.com where SIF listings still exist and 10s of 1000s of items can’t be found from the main site search.
Removing shops visibility is always a touchy subject for eBay sellers, but do the modules really make a difference to sales? I’m pretty sure that there are some strong opinions out there but ultimately eBay are the only ones who see the full click through rates for the definitive answer. What’s your gut feeling though? Do the shops links make a difference to your sales on eBay?
Via Auctionbytes
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