eBay.com drops duplicate listings policy

November 21, 2008

eBay.com announced yesterday that search results would no longer hide duplicate listings from the same seller, a process that’s become known as “de-duping“. Where an individual seller has more than one identical listing for sale, all instances will now show in search; previously, only one would have been displayed. eBay say that sellers are now taking advantage of the boost that recent sales give their listings, by combining identical items into single listings offering multiple items for sale, and that “this has proven to be the right strategy for sellers and a great shopping experience for buyers”.

But this doesn’t feel quite like the whole story to me. If the policy works, and sellers are changing their behaviour as desired because of it, why change the policy? The duplicate listings policy was - at least in part - intended to stop a few huge sellers dominating particular categories: might we assume that eBay are now happy to have one or two or their largest sellers dominant after all?

eBay.com will continue to show a maximum of ten listings per seller per search results page. Sellers should at least spread their listings out over time rather than listing in ‘clumps’ to try to avoid having them hidden under this policy.

Written by Sue Bailey · Filed Under Site Changes, eBay.com | 4 Comments 

eBay.com ban ME page website links

May 20, 2008

As part of today’s policy changes, eBay.com have announced some major changes to the links policy. These will take effect from July, and have been announced for .com; when we know when and if they will affect sellers on other sites, we’ll let you know.

Likely to most affect sellers is the ban on About Me page links to a seller’s ecommerce website:

The new Links Policy prohibits linking from a seller’s listing or other content on eBay–including eBay Store pages, About Me pages, eBay Blogs, Reviews and Guides, and forums–to any site that offers a product or service for sale off eBay.

About Me pages have traditionally been the one place on eBay that sellers could legitimately link their website; eBay Blogs have - until now - been quite relaxed about the external links that were permitted.

Other links once permitted within listings have also been banned: pages which expand upon the item description or include terms and conditions not expressed on the listing page are no longer allowed. Sellers are permitted only the following links:

  • to third parties supplying solutions and services directly related to the listing (e.g. listing tools, hit counters, etc.)
  • up to five links to “eBay property” pages (i.e. eBay, PayPal, StubHub, Half.com etc.); quite where this leaves scrolling galleries of sellers’ other products, I wouldn’t like to guess
  • embedded links to videos, so long as the videos comply with eBay’s policies themselves
  • links to photos of the item for sale, “as long as the page displaying the photos doesn’t offer, or link to a site that offers a product or service for sale off eBay”.

Many sellers have, for years now, used eBay as a customer acquisition tool, directing prospective buyers to ecommerce websites by way of About Me pages and “further photographs” pages. This is going to be a very much more difficult process from now on, with eBay tightening up the opportunities for promoting off-eBay sales on-site. Sellers will perhaps have to accept that the first sale must be through eBay now, and work more on bringing returning happy customers back to their websites for subsequent purchases, rather than trying to funnel traffic from eBay to their own sites directly.

Written by Sue Bailey · Filed Under Site Changes, eBay.com | 28 Comments 

Samurai swords banned on eBay UK

April 2, 2008

This post was written in April 2008; specific information contained within it may be out of date.

eBay UK have announced that they are to ban the sale of samurai swords and imitation samurai swords from 6th April.

The sale, import and hire of replica samurai swords are to be outlawed in England and Wales. In a consultation paper published last year, Home Office Minister Vernon Coaker said, “We recognise it is the cheap, easily available samurai swords which are being used in crime and not the genuine, more expensive samurai swords which are of interest to collectors and martial art enthusiasts. As such as we are putting forward exemptions for these groups.”

However, no such exemption is being offered to eBay sellers. As the announcement goes on, “While there are some exceptions to this general ban, we don’t think it’s practical to enforce a policy based on these. The sale of samurai swords on eBay.co.uk will therefore be completely prohibited when the new law comes into effect on 6th April.”

In many ways, this is an understandable reaction from eBay. They have neither the staff, the expertise nor the opportunity to judge whether a sword put up for auction is genuine or imitation, and the last thing they want to do is to encourage those selling replica weapons to label them as the real thing, just to get around this ban.

But no doubt genuine martial arts enthusiasts will feel hard done by with this latest ban, just as those who sell worthwhile material in a downloadable form are protesting against the ban on their goods, and just as sellers of genuine designer gear got caught in the anti-fakes crossfire last year. As eBay work to clean up the site, I don’t suppose these sellers will be the last victims of tightened-up policies on what can and cannot be sold on eBay.

Written by Sue Bailey · Filed Under Featured | 7 Comments