A new eBay social sharing feature has launched this Easter. Designed for eBay Shop owners, it enables you to link your Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or Pinterest accounts right to your Shopfront and easily manage all of your social platforms on your new Seller Hub Social page.
With the new Social page, you’re able to:
- Drive traffic to your Shopfront through your existing social media accounts
- Create custom posts and generate new interest toward your page
- Add hashtags and images to showcase your listings, grab buyers’ attention, and spark engagement
- Manage posts on all social media platforms right from Seller Hub
Launched over Easter in the UK, Germany and Australia, this feature has been a long time coming as it was trialled in Australia a year ago… but one thing is missing.
eBay as a platform has one main job to do for sellers, and that is to provide buyers ready to purchase their products. That’s why sellers pay eBay fees. So, when the eBay Social Sharing feature was trialled in Australia it came with a fee incentive – a flat 2.75% category percentage fee (+ $0.33 fixed order fee) if a buyer clicked the link from the shared post and purchased an item within 30 days of clicking the link. Compare that to normal eBay Fees in Australia at the time of between 6.2% to 11.9% and it made sense to do some of eBay’s work for them.
A discounted fee for eBay Social Sharing was also touted at eBay Open in August 2021 when they introduced their plans, suggesting that US sellers would access a flat 2.50% + $0.30 fee when buyers purchased from their social links.
The question is, if eBay don’t introduce a discounted fee structure for clicks and purchases from eBay Social Sharing, why would you drive traffic to eBay instead of your own website, or indeed set up shop on your favourite social platform and sell direct there.
There is a ‘laziness’ incentive for small sellers that only sell on eBay as they’ve made it easy and a few clicks to attract buyers from your social following. However, there’s little incentive for brands and retailers that sell on multiple platforms and especially for those that already sell on social channels and don’t want to dilute those efforts unless there’s a fee incentive to do so.
