An experiment in International Visibility

[pierrelebel]

Much has been written on the subject.

How much visibility do Canadian sellers get on eBay.uk?  (when not paying extra for so-called 'visibility")

Does it matter where you list?

Yesterday I listed an item on eBay.com (USA) and the same item on eBay.fr (France).  To avoid problems with the "duplication" rules, one is listed at auction, the other at fixed price.

When searching eBay.uk I find my listing from France under "international sellers" but my listing from .com is not there (nor are the listings from other American sellers offering a similar item on .com)

It would seem that eBay.uk gives an advantage to listings from France over listings from the USA.

And the experiment continues....

Now I look on eBay.uk for an item listed on eBay.ca.

Listings offering similar items on eBay.ca (mine and my competitors) are seen.

So it appears eBay.uk will give visibility to listings from .ca but not .com

Interesting.  Is it possible that listing on eBay.ca (Canada) instead of eBay.com (USA) gives us an unknown advantage?

[pjcdn2005]

I'm not really surprised that European listings get priority on the UK site but I've never thought that .ca listings would get more visibility there than .com listings.  I'll try to do some testing as well.

[recped]

The different "ground rules" for which listings show in the default search vary from site to site and have since the Bill & Meg days.

Old timers may recall the "ditched battle" between .com and .uk back in the pre stores -to-core days. The last reference I remember was when eBay gave some vague comments about how some listings in some categories some of the time would appear in basic searches while others would not. At that time they stated it was based on categories and also number of listings returned by a specific search (ie: if a search on .com returned 1000's non .com might not show, if a search returned a small number of results non .com listings might be included). Of course this was all back in the day when the number of core listings was about 15 million.

I still notice that basic searches on .ca often return listings from .au & .uk (especially listings from China based sellers) that do not always show if the same search is done on .com (they do show if worldwide is selected).

On the other hand from what US sellers post they can't seem to exclude Chinese listings even when they select US Only (and it's not just the China seller, ships from USA listings).