eBay have made a change on eBay.com as to how ended items are displayed to users. Rather than displaying (or having a link to) the full original description they’re displaying a cut down header with only a thumbnail of the original gallery image.
This is leading to a raft of complaints from buyers and sellers alike. Both want to be able to verify the product matches the images. If you have a number of similar used items you want to be able to check the pictures to check exactly which product to despatch. If you’re the buyer when the item arrives again you want to be able to check it to make sure you’ve got the item you paid for.
Terapeak first highlighted the issue of missing pictures on ended items, explaining to their users that “Terapeak does not control this content”, and that it’s a change that eBay have made.
eBay have in past years placed growing importance on images, and increased the attractiveness of using eBay’s gallery images by including them all (not just the first image) in eBay search. In clothes, shoes and accessories you can display up to 12 gallery pictures for free, in other categories you have to pay for them and then pay again for Gallery Plus to display them in search results.
Removing images once an item sold makes eBay Gallery pictures an unattractive option and will drive sellers back towards self hosted pictures embedded in the item descriptions.
Both sellers and buyers want to be able to view images after a listing has ended. eBay need to find a solution for this and fast, in the mean time for any ended items on eBay.com that are missing their images you can view the same listing on eBay.co.uk and the images will be shown as demonstrated in the image on the above.
7 Responses
Not an issue for me as I self host with embedded pictures.
Therefore I approve of the idea as I can market the fact that my images are available post sale and this will drive more buyers to me! 🙂
Keep up the good work eBay!
The only sellers complaining will be the small private non techie sellers who use eBay hosting. Are ebay going to listen to these?
And what about feedback?
How is it going to be possible for the buyer to score the “item as described” DSR if the images are not available?
Another one for the eBay brains trust to think about?
Or are eBay hopeful that by not showing the images post sale DSR scores will be lower which improves eBay’s bottom line?
Came up against this problem this very afternoon – had to log into eBay.uk to to verify quite what it was I had sold!
Keep my self-hosted pics current for five months just in case of issues… well done eBay for creating another pointless problem, will they ever stop fiddling with their site?
Seems then that eBay did not tell site users on .com before the roll out.
This is unlikely to affect large and other sellers with big quantity listings as the listing will still be live until the last one is sold (and therefore not impacting on many buyers checking a post purchase listing).
Another little erosion of site functionality for both sellers and buyers of ‘one of a kind’ items.
I hope that users of other sites will be telling eBay just how welcome this would be on their site.
eBay can probably point to a statistic that not many buyers look at the listing post sale and so they took the decision to free up server space and save money.
Buyers are scoring “item as described” from memory without bothering to look at the original listing.
It suggests buyers only review the listing on receipt of the item if they perceive an issue otherwise they will score ***** automatically.
Now I don’t know if I am troubled by this or not. What I do wish for is some sort of system forcing buyers to contact sellers before a DSR score of 1 or 2 can be registered.
If this system was in place then I would not be bothered at all by the loss of post sale images.