Curated galleries of imagery found on eBay, dubbed as eBay Collections, are to be all but scrapped, it seems. Billed as an engaging tool for shoppers and a way to showcase eBay’s more eclectic selection of inventory, thematic collections were heavily promoted in search and also the eBay homepage.
eBay Collections, the Pinterest like, visual display of images on eBay will no longer be shown in search and browse results or the homepage. They will continue to exist in what will essentially be the little visited backwaters of the marketplace.
The Collections experiment came at a time when ‘curation’ was very much the industry buzz word and beautiful, colourful mosaics of pics were increasingly being used to promote and expose inventory. Certainly eBay in the UK was so committed to Collections that they had a team of staff building collections in the Richmond office that could be used in email campaigns and across the site. That the community wasn’t generating such content might suggest that collection were never particularly successful.
The value of collections to sellers was never plausibly explained from the moment of launch. Certainly some sellers did explore the possibilities and pull together collections that featured their own sales and beautiful imagery but there was never any buzz about the new development. Even at the start they didn’t seem to have much of an impact considering their prominence. And it’s difficult to recall ever hearing a single seller enthusing over them at any point over the past 3 years..
Although we’ve only seen this change being mentioned with relation to the eBay.com US eBay site, it seems likely that it will come to the rest if the world in due course as the various changes signalled by Devin Wenig recently start to filter down to the various eBay sites.
4 Responses
We had about 30 collections in the end, and if you actually worked them correctly they did have some benefit. Again the issue was the limited scope of mobile shopping. However we were getting sometimes 100 followers on a collection, we could even add video to them via ebay.com (not Uk)…..Those customers always got your feed also. You could target some pretty specific products, we have had some of our collections shared right across social media. They actually work, and they have given up to quickly as normal.
Noticed they had given up earlier when we were not getting any followers anymore.
There you go again, Ebay. Introduce something. Get sellers to buy into it. Then dump it.
We found collections beneficial because of the cross-site promotion on pininterest, facebook, twitter etc.
Like Sam said above, if you used them well, they had impact across different sites, with buyers who might not automatically go straight to Ebay to find something.
Every time we created a new collection, there was a noticeable spike in sales for those items.
Particularly of use to us in collectables where there are no product identifiers.
With the increasingly erratic search returns and often irrelevant item specifics, this was of real benefit.
Underlines again that Devin Wenig has no interest in or understanding of sellers of items in collectables or similar areas.
if they were serious about them, why not inform sellers?
“hey, we featured your product(s) in some of our collections,
you’ve sold 12 items as a result, here’s a breakdown:”
really difficult to implement? not at all.
not beneficial enough? I’d find benefit to it.
ebay are just too lazy and short sighted, and view sellers as a burden? thats my bet.
but just like daily (weekly) deals, you dont even know if you’re on one, or if you’ve sold anything as a result.
I’ve always used them.
But the tools have been intermittently broken over the last 18 months or so – the basic tools to add items to a collection, or delete them. And they have sometimes taken weeks to fix.
The most useful function I’ve found for collections, is to draw together a customised “collection” to suit a particular customer, who might want to see all the in-stock red widgets in sizes 14 and 25, that will fit his particular model, and can’t do this through eBay search.
Sending a list of more than 3 item numbers, or links, is tedious for both parties, but a custom-built collection allows a quick visual display with links to whichever red widget takes his fancy.