We’ve all seen the Facebook selling pages (Facebay) where you can list items you have for sale locally. It’s great because your buyer could be just around the corner and turn up to pay cash and collect the item within minutes of agreeing a purchase. It would appear eBay have also taken note as they’ve just launched eBay Local, a peer to peer selling experience across the country.
eBay say that they know that buyers love to shop local. So this Local initiative is all about communities – and immediacy. In a nutshell they say, there are 13 million items available through the site for local pick up right now. That’s a huge range of products being a stone’s throw away from where we live or work and are ready to be picked up.
The Local initiative is a way to promote the ease of local collection and encourage buying and selling within communities.
This is interesting because local sales also fulfils the immediacy of delivery requirement that so many buyers are looking for today. eBay may not be able to provide an Amazon like one hour delivery service, but they can surface items I can collect within a couple of miles of home.
One thing that not everyone will like, is that eBay display search results as pins on Google maps. You can see exactly how far away from home but of course you still won’t know the house number.
Out of interest and seeing as eBay’s promo video is about an Action Man, I did a search for the same and it appears my nearest seller is 0.27 miles away – less than a five minute walk from home.
More than 13 million items on eBay are waiting to be collected locally right now. Log on, search and buy it now.
WARNING: These items might include vintage collectible toys destined to eternal battle
Posted by eBay.co.uk on Thursday, 11 August 2016
7 Responses
Surely a slogan which is so closely linked to one particular football team is not the best way to encourage a wide variety of people to love ebay ?
When you buy or sell to someone online it’s anonymous, so individual bias and prejudices don’t enter the equation, but I can imagine this buy local initiative will result in several lost sales or even an increase in scams, where the buyer takes a dislike to the seller for reasons which probably would not apply if they had never met.
Looks interesting, but how can this be channeled to increasing sales?
History repeating itself.
This was done you used to be able too search locally , years ago
I wonder if this will move over to Gumtree eventually.
Will they relax the insistence on Paypal at the same time? The Paypal/collection scam is something they cannot ignore.