Tamebay reader was delighted to view her eBay listings and see a new banner from eBay promoting her postage discount.
As she says “eBay’s now putting a whacking great message about free delivery on listings if you’ve got a ‘Spend X for free P&P’ rule set up“, and “there’s *another* banner between the header and the description that shows a selection of eligible items and a box that shows you how much more you’d need to buy from me to qualify if you purchased the listing you’re looking at“.
There banners aren’t new, we’ve seen them on eBay Enterprise sellers (large outlets) listings. If they encourage multiple sales from a single seller that’s a good thing.
Historically eBay was all about sellers driving traffic to their other listings and eBay shops. Shop Inventory Format (SIF) listings were effectively hidden listings that buyers would only see if they were browsing your shop, but in more recent years eBay have taken this type of shop benefit away. Now all listings are in main eBay search so why would I browse or search your eBay shop when I can simply search the whole of eBay?
I’ve very little loyalty left towards individual sellers – especially with the push towards free post. Whereas in the past I would happily tot up the total of goods from a single seller and save on postage that doesn’t happen nearly as much as it used to. If everything is free post I’ll just search eBay for the cheapest of each individual item I want to buy.
By driving traffic back to eBay shops and encouraging multiple purchases with the new free delivery banners, eBay are once again starting to support smaller sellers. That’s got to be a good thing.
Many thanks to Caroline for spotting the banners. Running a bead shop she’s got and it’s definitely the type of shop in which buyers are interested in making multiple purchases.
2 Responses
I’ve noticed this function since several days ago.
obviously it’s a good function for both sellers and buyers. however it’s a little unfair that by now only a few so called “enterprise accounts” can use it.
We’ve had this showing on our listings for just over a month – we offer free postage on purchases of three or more items – and have seen multiple sales rise accordingly.
Unfortunately this doesn’t qualify as offering free postage under the new TRS rules, but we hope that this will reduce some of the impact when we lose our TRS status because of this. Multiple sales are worth so much more to us than single items, and we know that prices in our category will rise if others do decide to offer free postage – there simply isn’t enough margin to cover it, so we are hopeful that we will actually end up more competitive and this is one eBay change that will have a positive impact on our business.