eBay Briefs Top Sellers on Strategies, Search

eBay gave a webinar presentation to its top sellers on Thursday afternoon. It touched on Seller standards, feedback revisions, the new AdCommerce pay-per-click ad program and holiday marketing, but spent most of the time focused on its Best Match search and "Recent Sales" criterion.

eBay said the key criterion for auction-style format was Time Ending Soonest ("we love auctions," it said), while for Fixed Price format, the key criterion was Recent Sales. eBay said "price really matters" and devoted two slides to show how sellers need to actively manage their prices to compete. (See Thursday's AuctionBytes Blog post for more information.)

eBay said the majority of questions it receives from sellers have to do with Best Match and search. Auctions get higher conversion rates, and 70 percent of listings on the first pages of search results are auction listings, though it varies both by category and by search query. Auction listings with a Buy It Now option is subject to the search criteria of auctions (meaning the key criteria is Time Ending Soonest).

Other information coming out of the presentation includes:

• eBay said sellers were seeing an increase in sales on the 30th day of their fixed-price listings and came to the conclusion that Time Ending Soonest played a role, but eBay said it is due to the email that is automatically sent to shoppers who are "watching" listings on the last day of a listing. eBay may change the frequency of those emails for long duration listings.
• eBay is rolling back its identical listing policy for fixed price listings as early as next week (it had rolled back the policy for auctions shortly after it had introduced the policy).
• Microsoft Live Search Cashback only works with Buy It Now Items through PayPal. It does not work when Best Offer is used on Buy It Now items. It does not work with third-party checkout, only with PayPal payments through eBay Checkout.
• eBay will introduce DSR granularity in the first quarter of 2009 so sellers can analyze DSRs by category, date, geography and shipping service.

Comment on the AuctionBytes Blog