eBay

rose-dee · ‎03-13-2018

EBay sent me a lovely message today, telling me peremptorily that "Guides" were being removed -- and rather quickly at that:

"eBay is discontinuing guides and will be removing them from the site between now and April 12, 2018. We’re letting you know because it looks like you’ve created at least one guide.

If you’ve used guides to help bring buyers to your listings, we offer sellers even more effective ways to generate traffic. Learn how promoted listings and Promotions Manager will help you drive velocity."

Yes, eBay, I did use "Guides" to help bring buyers to my listings, and I spent a fair amount of time writing them with care.

This was one of the last remaining personalized features on eBay (they got rid of the "Me" page long ago), helping to connect buyers with sellers and showing there was a real human being working away behind the listings. I'm not surprised at this move, given all the other "homogenizing" eBay has been doing lately, just rather sad. They really don't want buyers to see us.

Promoted listings, yeah that costs me more money and makes you extra money eBay. Promotions Manager -- yeah, works like a charm (when it functions). Fine. Great. I'll be uploading my "Guides" and putting them on a blog. Thanks for nothing.

widgetc · ‎03-13-2018

"Promoted listings, yeah that costs me more money and makes you extra money eBay."

I won't use them! It is a zero sum game. You get bumped up...so others effectively get bumped down. If everyone uses it we are all back on a level playing field with eBay raking in bigger bucks. No thanks! I object on principle.

momcqueen · ‎03-13-2018

Thread from yesterday:

https://community.ebay.ca/t5/Canada-Town-Square/eBay-is-discontinuing-guides-Grrr/m-p/396847#M35400

hlmacdon · ‎03-13-2018

@rose-deewrote:
I'm not surprised at this move, given all the other "homogenizing" eBay has been doing lately, just rather sad. They really don't want buyers to see us.

That is basically it. They no longer want the experience to be about the seller you are dealing with, but about the "ebay" experience. It won't be long before entire categories will have the ability to populate descriptions removed and I can foresee them removing the ability of a seller to list any terms/etc. They want catalog items to drive SEO. Moving forward I don't see much ROI for anyone building any sort of a brand through the platform. Sellers are fulfillment partners moving forward.

It doesn't get any more cynical than telling sellers to forget any real content, value add traffic activities but to instead just pay them for "visibility" or just discount your product. It's almost like they hired all their marketing people from the grocery business. Sad.

rosscd57 · ‎03-13-2018

@rose-deewrote:

This was one of the last remaining personalized features on eBay (they got rid of the "Me" page long ago), helping to connect buyers with sellers and showing there was a real human being working away behind the listings. I'm not surprised at this move, given all the other "homogenizing" eBay has been doing lately, just rather sad. They really don't want buyers to see us.

Well there is more than one way to skin a cat and end run a lot of these eBay moves that they can't do much about.

__________________________________________________________

Old enough to know better. Young enough to do it again. Crazy enough to try

rose-dee · ‎03-14-2018

@hlmacdonwrote:
It doesn't get any more cynical than telling sellers to forget any real content, value add traffic activities but to instead just pay them for "visibility" or just discount your product. It's almost like they hired all their marketing people from the grocery business. Sad.

Exactly my feeling about this platform lately.

ricarmic · ‎03-14-2018

I will confess that I haven't visited the guides in a very long time.

I do know that at least in my category (stamps), the guides were not always giving advice or instruction that I agreed with or thought was perhaps correct.

It would be very hard for eBay to moderate the guides.

In my category they created generic ones years ago, but all the personalized ones were still live. That's the last time I looked at any.

pjcdn2005 · ‎03-14-2018

I've also noticed that some of the guides are not accurate at all so I really don't see this as a bad thing. I have a feeling too that few ebayers ever look at them.

rose-dee · ‎03-15-2018

@pjcdn2005wrote:
I've also noticed that some of the guides are not accurate at all so I really don't see this as a bad thing. I have a feeling too that few ebayers ever look at them.

Could it be that few eBayer users look at the 'Guides' because eBay buried them deep on the site, making them so difficult to find that they became effectively invisible?

At one point in the past, as I'm sure you'll recall, the "Reviews & Guides" link (along with the "Me" link) was displayed right up front with the seller's ID. When they removed the link, my visitor count to my "Guides" did go way down. But I don't think that was an accident on eBay's part. That was also around the time that eBay introduced many automated features, and started putting space between sellers and their buyers in other ways (such as moving and changing the old "Ask Seller a Question" link that had been so prominently and conveniently displayed at the top of every listing).

As for moderation of content for accuracy, even Wikipedia is a mostly self-moderated site. I doubt eBay's concept of "Guides" was ever encyclopedic anyway, but primarily marketing-oriented, its purpose being first and foremost to drive interested readers to sellers' listings.

Whether it actually made a significant difference for every seller was moot -- it probably made some difference to some sellers, which was better to eBay than nothing at all. But of course now eBay wants sellers to pay for any difference ('Promoted Listings'), not get it for free.

rose-dee · ‎03-15-2018

Another thought occurred to me. EBay is stripping the site (at least on .com and .ca) of the last of its free promotional features in order to stack the deck in favour of its paid marketing features, i.e. remove internal free competition, however minor that competition might still be.

This would include the removal of 'Guides' and the discontinuation of 'Watchers' display on listings, as well as the fact that there are so very few free listing promos these days, most of them for next-to-useless auctions (which, coincidentally, would probably not compete with Promoted Listings). Gallery Plus is free in a couple of categories, but the fee for that feature has increased in others. Omniture disappeared, which allowed us to target our own markets. What other marketing feature is left that's free?

art-in-the-making · ‎03-15-2018

The good news maybe is eBay leaves itself so utterly wide open to competition from something like an old school eBay. Could be a start-up out there right now or somewhere on a drawing board that will hit the right combination of features and timeliness to rival the big boys and maybe even sweep some of them into the sea...

hlmacdon · ‎03-15-2018

@rose-deewrote:
Another thought occurred to me. EBay is stripping the site (at least on .com and .ca) of the last of its free promotional features in order to stack the deck in favour of its paid marketing features, i.e. remove internal free competition, however minor that competition might still be.

To my thinking that is the only way for them moving forward. From the point they got slapped with a manual penalty by Google they have been making up the drop in GMV growth (which they estimated in the hundreds of millions per year) by spending marketing dollars to stimulate activity. At a certain point you can't keep wholly subsidizing that with existing seller fee revenue. With the shift to trying to compete with Amazon as a retailer they have no choice but to build a marketing war chest to fund activities like the coupons we are seeing. The first part of this was to cynically cut our fee discounts and in some markets make the criteria for TRS more onerous. The second part of that has been promoting a pay for play approach, which means shifting away from listing promotions to generate traffic (since coupons fulfill this aim) and focusing on ways to extract money from sellers. It makes sense they would want to remove anything that detracts from pay for play options.

With marketing dollars to throw around at discounting and forcing prices down by forcing sellers to compete for the buy spot in mainstream categories you now project a false form of competitiveness and game some revenue growth in the short term. The next evolution we'll see the growth of more paid marketing features. Banner space for sale and placement on various landing pages will be more prominent. In the past you can tell ebay wasn't really charging for these as they were promoting junk by just lazily cobbling together barely relevant listings (promoting sellers with less feedback than I have fingers) in an effort to give off the illusion they are a traditional retailer. The next step is to fully monetize that. With a large ecommerce site it gets difficult to get real views (I don't count listing impressions, only page visits by humans) on listings and ultimately the easy way to accomplish that is by discounting and banner ads and landing pages.

I think they have grossly erred in not providing better ways for sellers to drive customers to their stores and better ways for buyers to follow their sellers (the pinterest style saved likes/follows is about it). This is something that Taobao does better and is a big reason for their success. They thrive because all of the niches on the site thrive, not just the mainstream junk which they are smart enough to focus on separately via Tmall. The current approach here was outdated and stale years ago. It can work if you are a retailer, but eBay is not a retailer. Ebay doesn't build a marketing warchest through MDF and VIR funds accrued from their product sales with their vendors, they do it by reaching into your pockets.