eBay to Launch Custom Promoted Stores Landing Page

by: etectra

eBay says to come to their site due to its popularity and the huge number of active buyers.

eBay then says you have to promote your listing offsite to attract buyers.

Both statements can't be true. When know the first one is false as eBay has lost millions of users, losing 9% of all active buyers in just the fourth quarter of 2021. Its not longer the late 1990s and early 2000s golden age of eBay.

eBay has lots of competition today, with various niche sites and Amazon and Shopify now controlling the #1 and #2 spots. So eBay stating you must promote offsite is admitting its fallen.

Then they say you have to promote your listings within eBay so your listing will not get lost within the shear volume of listings.

That makes no sense as a huge volume of eBay's volume is Chinese made junk being sold directly from China or via warehouses setup within the U.S. There is not chance your items would be confused with any of these items.

Buyers have a hard time finding your items on eBay due to eBay hiding them. I've done thousands of searches for eBay over the years and in recent years these often turn up searches with no results. Yet the same searches on Google find items listed on eBay. This means eBay's internal search engine is hiding the results - unless of course you pay them a bribe to unhide them less often.

Why would I pay eBay any promotions when a great deal of their income is derived form defrauding their users via various schemes? That is another sign of how far eBay has fallen.

Why would pay anything when they let fraudsters such as RockStarFlipper include a screenshot of his off eBay website as well as its name in the header of his eBay store in order to draw people off eBay to make off eBay sales? One rule for those than run eBay and their scumbag friends and one for everyone else.

by: Rexford

Manual control may not be as real—or as lasting—as advertised.  The most important promise teased in the removed update was: “manually select which items appear in your ads.”

That would be a significant shift, because today:  eBay—not the seller—decides which listings appear. Selection is based on “top performing” items and buyer behavior.

eBay has a track record of rolling out “control” features that later become limited, overridden, or quietly removed.  Even if sellers can initially choose listings, eBay may still override selections for “relevance” and blend in other items “to optimize performance”

Sellers should assume that eBay’s algorithmic priorities will still come first, regardless of what the UI appears to allow.

by: Snapped

“ Manual control may not be as real—or as lasting—as advertised “

Actually, ANY kind of ‘control’ for anything on their site is an optical illusion eBay has been waving around for almost two decades now.  They have publicly stated that people don’t know what they want, and that they do everything for ‘your’ benefit when that’s blatantly untrue.  They also, as noted, set their default to ‘opt in’, and then carelessly ‘forget’, -or is it purposefully neglect - to provide a working link to any clarifying information.  

Here’s a question:  who gets to be seen if ‘everybody’ promotes their items in a promoted ‘store’?  Oh- it depends on metrics?  Well, hasn’t it always?  Or rather, shouldn’t it?  

The only choice one really has anymore is to decide, or not, to do business with these shysters.