From time to time, I like to hop over to ebay.com to see what my stuff looks like from there.
Today, while browsing through Other Items for Sale from mjwl2006 ID (me) this is what I found when I went to enter a search term for one of my own categories: a whole fat ad right at the top of my list designed exclusively to lead buyers AWAY from my listings to look at unrelated matters being sold by everyone and their neighbour's dog EXCEPT me. What kind of tomfoolery is this? How long has this been happening?
designed exclusively to lead buyers AWAY from my listings to look at unrelated matters being sold by everyone and their neighbour's dog EXCEPT me.
It's a trade off, your listings will be promoted on the pages of other sellers and YOU get the opportunity to make a sale.
eBay could care less which seller makes the sale they just want a sale to be made.
Yes, but it still doesn't seem right that it is under your name. It wouldn't be as bad if it was above your name although it sucks either way 
<<This is a paid ad, I think,...>>
I would think so, yes. I went to the American site and tried your search terms, "paw patrol" to see what appeared,
(in Toys & Hobbies) without altering any of the ebay default settings.
Top of the listings is that gargantuan paid ad.
On the first page (of 50 offerings) of listings, - all US, China, Hong Kong, and Malaysia, but not one Canadian.
This is with ebays "best match".
When I chose to see 200 items per page(still with ebay's 'bm'), waaaay down the list is your listing for a multi-dog set.
One listing in 200.
I clicked on that listing, then over to See other items. That simply features all the listings. When I again sought
"paw patrol" , whilst it indicates you have 21 of these, - top of the page is that huge loud interloping advertisement.
Clicking on it reveals it is for [large retailer]. "[Large retailer] on ebay", and no surprise they ship using the GSP.
Equally unsurprising is the number of feedback complaints one can expect from a seller of that size, but then I thought,
if I click on View items for sale, -- will I be presented with an enormous ad for McQueen and Mo Mater?
"Paw patrol" brings up ads with "paw patrol" in it, but once again we see that same target ad. Fair enough, it does, after all,
belong on that seller's listings. But it seems sleazy to hurl it up in the face of viewers who are specifically browsing other
different sellers' items.
If ebay is going to permit that, - encourage it even, - they can expect a certain amount of criticism. Sure, it is all just
more ebay sales, but for sellers smaller than the target advertiser (almost everyone else) this will be particularly irritating.
On the sides of the page, maybe, but right on the top? And does it need to be so humongous?
Yes, it's a phenomena on ebay.com only, and only when one enters certain specific search terms, the ones they've earmarked as being in-demand or hot sellers.
But it's absolutely ebay paid ad placement, or one available to only specific Anchor Store sellers. Not the likes of most of us here with stores.
I've played with it a bit since making the initial discover mid-week. It is new(ish) and still unwelcome. Nothing like the Check Out What Other People Are Watching or Similar Items listing collections that you might find elsewhere on the page, on nearly every page.
My opinion of this hasn't changed. Let them throw an ad like this in the search terms for that item, but NOT beneath the listings as they have been specifically filtered by the searcher (buyer) to show stuff from only me.
Aside from that, it doesn't even contain any of the items in the actual search term, it's just a random assortment of other peoples' wares.
It makes me angry as a seller, and is stupid to buyers who are already confounded trying to find what they want in this haystack.
This is what it does to my search results:
And this is what the buyers gets to see when they click on the big ad (for everyone except me) that eats half my page of listings:
That's counterproductive.
