eBay are to close down their local services classified ads with immediate effect. Today is the last day that classified ads can be listed on the site, any current ads will run to their expiration date and then the Local Services classified ads section will be retired.
To be honest it’ll be no great loss – for too long eBay classified ads have been spammed with duplicates due to the free listing and whenever I’ve searched them there are never any results of interest. A search for a Window Cleaner has the nearest at 25 miles away and the next nearest at 70 miles. In typical eBay fashion the search for a window cleaner also offers a rather irrelevant “Windows Registry Cleaner” ad.
eBay recommend that if you want to list local classified ads in the UK then you should use Gumtree, which to be honest has always been my first port of call in any case.
One Response
This kind of thing scares me in that they could do the same thing with auctions and go to all flat price.
Just one day you wake up — log onto ebay — and “starting tomorrow there will be no more auctions — just fixed price listings”
Personally I think they already treat auctions as third class citizens…
If they wanted to encourage auctions they would have an auctioneer status as a companion to store status and it would change your rates as follows:
8.75% on the amount of your minimum price/reserve.
4% on the amount beyond that.
This would encourage people to start their auctions lower as opposed to doing faux flat rate “auctions” where you start it at what you want to get for it.