According to an announcement from eBay UK, they will be adding buyer questions and seller answers to product reviews that appear in eBay listings over the next few months.
As they say in their announcement: “It’s pretty standard for customers to want to ask a question about a product when they’re thinking about buying it. Plus, when shoppers ask questions, it means they’re already engaged with the product so a swift and helpful reply could make all the difference to completing that sale.
That’s why we’re adding to our popular product reviews and ratings by adding product questions and answers later this year. We’ll start to display questions and answers on your listings from October 2017. This content will help make your listing more engaging as well as making it easier for buyers to find your items via eBay search and popular search engines. Being able to ask questions about product before buying it could also reduce costs related to customers service and returns.”
All in all this sound like a decent idea, if nothing ground-breaking. Any shared information in answers in response to genuine, useful questions from shoppers can help others. It can save a seller from having to answer the same question in future too. It’s also perhaps a useful pointer for sellers about what additional information could be included in listings and descriptions to make them even more useful.
But it’s a shame we don’t have more information here, even a graphic rendering of an example, of how this new feature will appear on eBay UK. Hopefully more details will emerge in due course.
And there has to be a question of moderation too. As is obvious from other sites sometimes product reviews and user content can be unreliable, or even deliberately humorous, so quality control will be useful. And will there be usefulness ratings from users to improve the rankings of questions.
8 Responses
Haven’t you always been add Q&A to the bottom of your description? You certainly used to be able to..
It makes me wonder how much they pay the execs at ebay to sit around and think about the next way they are going to copy amazon. It seems to be a relatively easy job.
I give this system 10 to 15 seconds before someone begins abusing it. Enjoy the additional moderation work I guess.
Why are they announcing features like this when there are more pressing matters at hand. Such as the ability to transfer large files across it’s messaging system, without breaking ebay TOS.
On one hand Ebay introduce this which I personally would never use but on the other hand they stop buyers being able to contact sellers to verbally discuss the products on sale. Crazy.
What happens when someone asks “Please can I have your contact details to discuss this product” Or “Please can I have your address so I can collect from you please”
All of which happen frequently.. When does this new service conflict with the new policy on contact details? Because if it doesn’t then I’ll ask the question myself under all of my listings 🙂