eBay have added new “Like”, “Want” and “Own” buttons on some eBay.com listings. It appears to be mainly a social network sharing experiment, although it looks very much as though it should have been integrated with existing eBay lists.
When you click one of the new buttons it adds the item to one of three lists which can be viewed in your . Where this immediately falls down is that eBay users already have plenty of lists – A Watch List, Wish List, Gift Ideas List and Research List, plus any other lists that you’ve already created yourself, but the new Social Favourites tool doesn’t add items to any of your existing lists – It creates three new lists and once they’re created they’re not easy to find unless you remember the URL.
Having a list that you can’t easily revisit seems to be a bit of a waste of time, so we can conclude the only reason they’re here is to encourage you to stick eBay items onto Facebook.
When you click to “Like”, “Want” or “Own” an item on an eBay listing you immediately get the opportunity to add it to your Facebook wall. It’s only if you visit your Social Favourites that you’re presented with the full range of eBay social network buttons – email, Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. I’m not sure why you’d bother though as these buttons already appear at the top of all eBay.com listings anyway.
So in conclusion the buttons add items to lists which don’t appear alongside your existing eBay lists and give you another way to share on social networking sites with heavy bias to Facebook. eBay would have done better to incorporate this new feature with both existing lists in My eBay and with the existing social networking buttons on listings.
Perhaps I’m underestimating eBay and they’re about to remove the original social networking buttons, scrap the old Watch and Wish lists and replace the whole lot with the new Social Favourites lists and buttons? Otherwise it does look like doubling up of existing features instead of an incremental enhancement.
