Is this the return of Stores in Search?
26/04/2008 at 22:05
A poster on the eBay.com Stores discussion format has copied an interesting question from a recent eBay survey:
Imagine that eBay updated its current eBay Stores product offering: In the revised eBay Stores product offering, listings in the Store Inventory Format:
Would be shown in Core eBay search results with Buy It Now items and Auction items.
Would have lower Insertion Fees than Buy It Now listings depending on the eBay Store product to which you subscribe (see details in table below).
Would have the same Final Value Fees as Buy It Now listings.
Imagine eBay made the explained changes to the Store Inventory listing format and also introduced (30 days, Good ‘Til Cancelled) listing duration and ($0.30) Insertion Fee to the Buy It Now listing format.
Monthly subscription fee
Basic Store $24.95 .10 store listings in core
Premium Store $59.95 .05 store listings in core
Anchor Store $299.95 Free store listings in core
In addition to these changes, imagine that eBay offered longer durations of 30 days and Good ‘Til Canceled for all Buy It Now listings at no extra charge.
Taking into account these changes, would you consider continuing subscribing to one of the eBay Stores if eBay offered them at a reasonable subscription fee?
Longer-term sellers will remember the last time when stores’/shops’ items showed in search, an experiment which was abandoned by eBay as apparently sellers were overwhelmed with too many items showing in search results – and presumably eBay themselves lost revenue as sellers stopped bothering to list in core.
If the survey question reflects eBay’s intentions for changes to SIF listings, they might have found a way to overcome both of those problems. eBay may well think that Best Match will keep search results from overwhelming buyers.
What do you think? Would this send you running to subscribe to an Anchor Shop? Leave us a comment.
Via Auctionbytes via Randy.
Cliff Aliperti says
6:18 am on 27/04/2008
Definitely Premium, possibly anchor in the future.
If it’s that flat it doesn’t pay to go Anchor until/if you have 6,000 items listed, no?
Of course I have a feeling that there’d be more to it than this, little surcharges here and there and little carrots tacked onto to each level.
They really love this “Best Match” crap, don’t they?
Could be interesting though, I’ll be curious to see if it happens.
Debbie and Glenn says
9:04 am on 27/04/2008
We are volume sellers who list the majority of our stock as BIN on a ten-day listing. We consistently see buyers purchasing items which are in the last couple of hours of the ten-day frame, even through the products have been on offer for 10 days. If buyers continue with the same pattern, would we experience items being purchase in the last couple of hours of a thirty-day frame? This could potentially have a negative effect on sales. Like the idea of 30 day BIN but needs a bit more planning.
Cliff Aliperti says
9:30 am on 27/04/2008
Hi Debbie and Glenn,
I was thinking the same thing, actually typed it out, when something occurred to me and I went back and erased it–eBay doesn’t think this is going to matter to us because search is going to revolve around “Best Match,” not items ending soonest or newly listed.
I disagree with them on that quite a bit, as a shopper I have my searches, I conduct them regularly, and Best Match does me no benefit. Any search I conduct that doesn’t default to the Newly Listed or Ending Soonest items is soon sorted one of those two ways manually by me.
So, while I agree with what you say 100%, the extra lag time in between listings ending would kill us as sellers, I feel the eBay of the near future will render this irrelevant through Best Match.
Of course, it could just be a way to get us to list items even more often so there’s always something ending soon and newly listed
Piero says
11:46 am on 28/04/2008
they are starting doing this on ebay Italy by 3 of June