Even more adverts for eBay’s view item page

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Starting today eBay will begin to test text ads on all eBay UK listings. They will be similar in appearance to the text adverts which already appear at the bottom of search results pages.

eBay say that they’ll be monitoring the results of these tests and pending results they may become permanent. I have to say that the only reason they’ll be deemed worthy of permanent placement will be if buyers are clicking on them. No clicks means no revenue for eBay (regardless of if it’s a pay-per-click or pay-per-acquisition (sale) model). That means success for eBay will be to drive traffic from your listings to off-eBay merchants.

Of course if you’re a potential advertiser it’s worth a punt to see if you can pay to divert traffic from eBay to your own website. Plenty of advertisers already do as evidenced by the text ads at the bottom of search results pages.

Personally I don’t really care that much if eBay have adverts on the view item page or not – I’m confident that the items I offer on eBay are good enough that buyers won’t be distracted by the adverts and like it or not eBay are going to squeeze every last bit of revenue out of the site. However before eBay start messing around with the page design to stick some more adverts on the site wouldn’t it have been a better idea to fix the last abortion of a design that they’ve inflicted on Top Rated Sellers at the top of the page? Note the acres of wasted space on a 1024×768 resolution screen which I’ve highlighted in red.

Top Rated eBay sellers (those that eBay say give the very best buying experience) have the very worst view item page design on eBay. Come on eBay, fix it, and then we won’t complain so much when you inflict more adverts on us. All the time your adverts make our listings look like a school child designed them you’re just giving us a valid reason to complain vociferously about your advert placements.

15 Responses

  1. I’ve never seen an advert on eBay… maybe this is because I run Firefox with the Ad Killer app, it’s lovely without ads 🙂

  2. adBay has a nice ring to it dontcha think ?

    I am with Mike on this, Firefox and ad blocker as I am sick of “winning” things all the time XD

  3. A little bit…. leads to a big bit…&…Give them an inch & they’ll take a mile, come to mind here.

    Ebay are getting silly, with ad’s, we paid for the page listing, & they should not be able to do this….

  4. Basically by now we should be permitted to put links to our own websites in our own listings.

    ebay could sell link licences for say £10 per month permitting sellers to include 1 link in each of their listings to their own website.

    More revenue for ebay after all and a big incentive for sellers with their own websites to list more on ebay!

  5. I think it looks bad and feels desperate plastering the site with ever more ads. It’s not as if there aren’t enough already.

  6. If ebay must do this add thing, maybe this is somthing they should be looking at, hint hint ebay

    If I do buy something on ebay, its something that is very unusual and hard to source hence why I am looking on ebay, maybe the adds should follow suit.

    A nice trip in a hot air ballon sounds nice, can I see an advert for that, I could do with learning how to use excel better, how about a training course advert for city and guilds.

    As a customer to be honest I used to always use ebay to buy, now I dont as a customer amazon gives me what im looking for so to be honest i would only buy on ebay as a last resort.

    Ebay needs to speak to people like me and many others and find out why i have ditched them and switched to amazon (im saying this as a buyer and not a seller)

  7. Why don’t eBay give its a sellers a small percentage of any ads clicked, that appear on their pages – at least this would appease a larger number of people.

    eBay is starting to look very spammy these days.

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