eBay push Top-Rated Seller, Free Shipping, PayPal, Buy It Now listings

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eBay are introducing measures to drive traffic to Top-Rated Seller, Free Shipping, PayPal, Buy It Now listings. The eBay Partner Network (ePN aka eBay affiliate program where advertisers place banner ads on their websites and get paid to drive traffic to eBay) are to roll out a a major Custom Banner upgrade on Monday.

The new banner ads available to advertisers will show the badges for Top-Rated Seller, Free Shipping, PayPal, Buy It Now and add the ability to filter for listings with Free Shipping and those from Top-Rated Sellers.

It may be appear to be a minor change, but if affiliate marketeers start driving traffic to specific sets of listings and in particular to listings from Top Rated Sellers those who’s listings don’t appear will be further disadvantaged. For those who are Top Rated it’s yet another indicator that eBay want you to offer Free Shipping Fixed Price listings and to accept PayPal.

8 Responses

  1. its going to take a lot more than a banner ad filter string,to frighten us into offering “free shipping”

  2. Like many media sellers I had a good old moan when ebay insisted on Free Postage for media items. Clearly this had a negative financial impact and ebay reserved the decision and we now have a capped postage charge. Now don’t get me wrong I’m running a business and I fully accept that ebay will always do what’s best for ebay, but promoting sellers who offer free postage in preference to those that don’t, may also be a decision they regret. Any media seller charging postage and not offering postal discount on multiple purchases is in my opinion shooting themselves in the foot. Buyers know that sellers incorporate postage charges in the overall cost of an item and can reasonable expect a discount on a multiple purchase order. Everybody loves a discount (just look in any high street shop – Discount and Sale are prominent words everywhere).

    I would suggest that a buyer purchasing two or more items and receiving a discount will be far happier than the buyer who buys the same three items and doesn’t.

    Perhaps sellers offering postal discount should get higher placement. (I should be so lucky!)

  3. We think its more to do with flogging banner ads than seller promotion

  4. Nothing desperate here. They aren’t doing anything that couldn’t have already been done via the Finding API or via eBay search. They are just making it easier for their affiliates to do something they may have already been doing.

    On the otherhand if you want to promote Amazon listings you can’t show the total price. You actually have to resort to scraping their site and parsing out the results to get the S&H portion. For non-media listings that could be anything. How does that benefit anyone?

    However I do have issue with 2 claims that eBay makes regarding sales on their site:

    1) Something like 90% of buyers never visit the second page of search results.
    2) Buyers love free shipping and TRS sellers and the proof is that’s where all the growth on eBay is.

    They leave out the part where they give a special boost in search results for both of those factors. Combined with #1 it is probably the real reason behind that growth. I suppose this banner upgrade could actually prove this one way or the other since according to eBay’s statements using either filter should have lead to an improved conversion rate.

  5. yet another indicator that eBay want you to offer Free Shipping Fixed Price listings and to accept PayPal.

    Of course they do, as they get paid more money.

    I just wonder why they don’t add to every article, “if you don’t like it then you know where the door is”

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