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Ina Steiner is co-founder and Editor of EcommerceBytes and has been reporting on ecommerce since 1999. She's a widely cited authority on marketplace selling and is author of "Turn eBay Data Into Dollars" (McGraw-Hill 2006). Her blog was featured in the book, "Blogging Heroes" (Wiley 2008). She is a member of the Online News Association (Sep 2005 - present) and Investigative Reporters and Editors (Mar 2006 - present). Follow her on Twitter at @ecommercebytes and send news tips to ina@ecommercebytes.com. See disclosure at EcommerceBytes.com/disclosure/.
I very closely monitored this fiasco, both on eBay’s community board and their social media team’s responses.
Clearly it doesn’t take an ecom marketing genius to recognize that moving the promo banner “below the fold” near the bottom of the listing was an asinine move and would reduce sellers’ promo uptake.
I still believe their intention was (is) to free up more “surface area” screen real-estate to continue to shoehorn-in more promoted listings, moreso than any real effectiveness metric on the promo placement location factored in this move (anyone else notice the occasional lineup of other similar items at the TOP of listings, of which the 1st is a promoted item)?
What concerned me more is the complete lack of transparency from eBay about moving the banner, and that even their own internal communication is so poor none of these critical front-end changes had been communicated to their own support teams.
Note that eBay has also confirmed that your promotions won’t necessarily even appear in search results at all, but this hasn’t garnered the backlash the promo banner move on the listing page (but it should, since if your promo doesn’t appear in search results it can’t influence views and conversions).