Common Sense eCommerce

A few weeks ago, I starting noticing this little text ad nugget appearing at the bottom of each of my listings.

I remember being a little miffed at the time, but shrugged it off. Then I read Sydney Johnston’s newsletter where she says:

When you pay your eBay listing fees, what you are buying is advertising space on eBay’s giant site.”

I got to thinking, how true! And how unethical on the part of eBay. When you consider that we pay for listings on eBay (and oh how the listing fees have gone up over the years) the space inside the auction listing should be ours. At the very least, we should have a choice whether or not to display eBay advertisements. There’s no telling how much extra revenue this little ad brings to eBay. But the bottom line is that we’ve already paid for that space and we should have some control.

Aside from that, it’s not even relevant advertising. All the ones I’ve seen go to a Credit Bureau ad. Unless I’m selling something credit-related, this has no business on my auction listing. Now, I thought eBay was going to try to ‘improve the buyer experience’ this year. Isn’t that what they said? Hmmm. Dishing up junk ads is not improving, but it’s deteriorating the buyer experience if all they’re going to show is credit bureau ads.

As if that’s not bad enough, the text ad links do not initiate a new browser session. That means if the buyer clicks on it, he or she’s gone! Gone away from my listing which presumably they were intersted in to begin with.

This is one of those little things that is bad news for sellers. It’s not like we need any more things to complain about is it? Now, the ads are tied to the counters. Sydney points out that a way around is not to use the eBay counters. This might be a good reason to go with an auction management system like Vendio where counters are provided.

However, what will they do next? Build ads into the main eBay listing CSS?

Tags: eBay Credit Ads, eBay Experian Ads, eBay Listing Ads, eBay Counter Ads

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