Showing posts with label eBay listings. Show all posts
Showing posts with label eBay listings. Show all posts

Friday, 9 November 2012

eBay's search changes and how they impact variation listings

This last week eBay have made a number of changes to the way items with multiple variations appear within the search results page. Depending on the type of eBay store you run, these changes could either be positive or negative. 

The main difference between the new search results and the old setup is that the products listed within the search results will no longer display multiple variations of a product. For example, if you are selling a clothing item, the search result will no longer display all of the different colour variations that are available. Instead, the result will display the variation image closely matched to the search criteria. For example, if you search for "Red Dress," the search results will show the product image in the variation of red, rather than showing multiple colour variations. 

However, the multiple variation feature hasn't been completely removed, just merely hidden. If the user selects "More options" next to the product image, they will be able to see more information about the product which includes the various other variations that the product has.

The main problem people running an ecommerce store are finding with the new search layout is customers incorrectly purchasing an item in the wrong size as, although they have searched for one specific variation, once the system has found this particular product variation, it populates all the other variations randomly. This means that people are then selecting the item thinking it is the right size and instantly "Buy it now" and before the issue has been discovered, the item has already been shipped. Obviously, this is a time consuming and annoying situation for both the buyer and seller. 

Also, as eBay picks up variations based on colour, it is strongly advised that the seller be as basic as they possibly can when entering this colour information for each of their products. For example, if your product is "Persian red," it would be better to just simply put it as "red." The reason for this is that very few people will search for Persian red meaning that when they type red into their search parameters, your products are going to appear further down the search results as they do not match the search results as much as other listings above it. 

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Monday, 29 October 2012

Another 50,000 free listings from eBay

As the American Presidential elections roll on, eBay are looking to take advantage of this political hype with yet another free listing promotion.

Running from today up until November 4th, like some of their previous promotions, this promotion is only available to those who have received an invitation. Those who are lucky enough to take part in the promotion are able to list up to 50,000 auction listings without having to pay any listing fees. If you are an ecommerce store who only deals in the "Buy It Now" option, you can still take advantage of this promotion by having the Buy It Now option appear on the auction listings. 

As an added incentive to take part in the promotion, eBay are also allowing every listing added to have a total of 12 different pictures for free, allowing you to increase your chances of making a sale by giving the customer a good look at your products.

As the promotion is based around the US elections, the promotion is only available on the ebay.com website. Like all previous eBay free listing promotions, all of the usual terms and conditions apply.

With the promotion already in full swing, make sure you take advantage of your free 50,000 listings before the deadline this Sunday.



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Friday, 31 August 2012

eBay's free listing promotion

eBay have announced that between the 1st-9th of September, private sellers will be able to list items for free. 

As any listing of 99p or less is already free, eBay have now given users the ability to list up to 150 items over this price with no cost for the first 9 days of September. However, the promotion is only available to eBay sellers living in the UK.

Any products listed below the £1 threshold will not count towards this promotion and will count towards your 100 monthly limit

Items listed in "Cars, Motorcycles & Vehicles" and "Property" will be excluded from being able to take part in this promotion.

Also, if you use professional listing tools such as "Turbo Lister" or "Selling Manager Pro" you will also be unable to take advantage of this promotion. 

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Wednesday, 15 August 2012

eBay Thrown in to Anarchy

Earlier this week, many eBay stores were brought to a stand still as sellers reported numerous glitches and issues on the eBay website, making it almost impossible for them to run their store.

Some of the many problems customers were reporting, included:

  • Changes in Top Seller rating
  • Missing email notifications from eBay and Paypal
  • Photographs missing from listings
  • Missing item specifications

It is believed that these problems will harm eBay, not only in the amount of revenue they generate, but also their overall public image.

This isn't the first time problems have occurred on the marketplace and while you think a platform with over 100 million active stores is bound to have some problems from time to time, one seller shouldn't be able to see the details of another seller through their dashboard interface, which one seller claimed happened to them. These problems have resulted in some store owners becoming annoyed, preferring to leave eBay to go in search of another platform to run their online stores. 


While the problems were being fixed, many sellers were told not to list any products from anywhere between 24 hours to six days. Although this doesn't seem like very long at all when you look at the bigger picture, this is a time frame where your store competitors maybe selling products that you can't even list, possibly resulting in you losing future business from that customer.

This couldn't have happened at a worse time for eBay sellers as it is right smack in the middle of an eBay promotion that allows sellers to add 5,000 free listings in the fixed price format between the 8th and 18th of this month. 

All this comes in the wake of eBay achieving a record increase of fixed price sales by over 33% through July in comparison to the previous year. Ironic, huh?

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Monday, 13 August 2012

eBay hurting sellers with advertising strategy

eBay's recent addition of placing advertisements on sellers pages has been met with some hostility by a number of different sellers.

The advertising strategy, which was launched by eBay at the beginning of May, places an advertisement under the sellers information, giving customers details about various products on sale by a number of different major brands who have stores on eBay.

Do online sellers have a right to feel aggrieved by this? While eBay have categorically stated that these adverts will not include products from other rival sellers and that the sole aim is to bring additional value to the view item page, the last thing any seller would want is for a customer to open up the page of a product they are interested in, only to be then to be shown an advertisement of a similar product provided by a major brand.

While the product sold by the seller's eBay store could be much cheaper in price, store owners may find that many customers leave the seller's page in order to visit the brand's store, resulting in a loss of sales for that online seller.

The question also arises as to the ethics behind it. With a small ecommerce business spending their hard earned money for the ability to list their products on eBay, should the company be allowed to place advertisements of other brands on pages sellers have paid for without their permission? 

Although the ads on some sellers pages are in house advertisements and have nothing to do with the products a store owner sells, eBay should have some parameters in place to ensure that a conflict does not occur with the brand advert showing similar products to what the seller provides. 

What it seems from an outside perspective is that eBay are using small eBay stores as a platform to advertise their bigger brands. While this will generate greater revenue for both the large brands and eBay themselves, this is seemingly at the expense of small sellers, who could see an impact in their store's popularity and sales as a result. 

To combat this, many users of eBay have now looked to remove these advertisements altogether from their browsers through the use of various ad blocking programs. 

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Tuesday, 24 July 2012

New Final Value Fee Cap For eBay Sellers

On Tuesday 10 July, eBay increased its final value fee (FVF) for private sellers from £40 to £75. What this means is that for example, if you sell an item such as a laptop for £750, you will be required to pay a FVF of 10% which is £75. If you sell something that costs more than £750, the maximum fee you will have to pay will be £75. So even if you sell something for £1000 ,you will still only have to pay £75 in final value fees.

While this change happened two weeks ago, many eBay sellers have been surprised by the new final value fee when it has come to selling a product. When selling items privately on eBay, you should factor in this added cost before placing the listing to make sure you are happy with your profit on the item. Once the transaction has gone through, you will still be required to pay the new FVF even if you previously didn't know about it.

However, while the the FVF has changed, listing fees have stayed the same. Also, if you are privately selling motor vehicles, property or classifieds, these new final value fees will not apply. The fee will also remain unchanged for business sellers.

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