eBay are using Product Identifiers to create new single product pages displaying multiple offers from competing sellers along with a recommended “Top Pick” deal.
It would appear that eBay are heavily driving buyers to purchase the “Top Pick” and are endorsing it as the recommended deal.
eBay appear to rotate their “Top Pick” between sellers so in reality it doesn’t appear to be so much a top pick as a rotation of acceptable listings. It’s not always it’s not always the product at the top of eBay’s Best Match on their standard search results page or the best price, nor is it the seller with the best feedback.
Our friends at Bamford Trading were first to spot these new pages – you can read their thoughts on their eBay Expert blog.
When you visit an item which eBay can identify as a particular product, they invite you to compare offers from competing sellers with a “see more….” breadcrumb message at the end of the category display:
Click the link takes you to the single product page where you’ll find eBay’s recommended “Top Pick” above offers from other sellers.
(Click here to see the full eBay single product page)
As well as more options to buy, eBay also display an “About This Product” section with the Product Identifiers displayed alongside the key Item Specifics, comparisons with similar products and reviews.
The similar products we’ve seen often appear to be for the same item, but on a listing where the seller has failed to complete the product identifiers. Don’t think that just because you omit this information from your listing that eBay won’t still compare your product to others.
The guys at Bamford Trading think that this is one step away from eBay implementing a Buy Box similar to Amazon’s. Tell us if you can figure out the rules to win eBay’s Top Pick buy box.
As an aside it will be interesting to see how Google view the new pages. Google give eBay a manual downgrade for spamming search engines with pages in the past but these were pages buyers never saw and were designed purely for SEO. We know that Google adores structured data and product identifiers, so hopefully the search engine will love the new pages in which case it’s more important than ever to have your listing chosen to be eBay’s Top Pick.
3 Responses
the rules are “did you give ebay 30% extra FVF’s for sponsored results”?
Interesting that the TRS logo doesn’t appear anywhere currently so should we relax performance and concentrate on price? Certainly many of the Top Picks don’t have great metrics.
Hey that’s really familiar — I can’t remember if some other big ecommerce retailer does that…