Third party ads on eBay UK item pages

24/08/2008 at 12:48

eBay are now putting adverts for third parties on “view item” pages:

Sky item page ad

Adverts for Sky TV seem to have appeared on all listings on eBay UK in the Consumer Electronics category. I haven’t yet been able to find any others, though it’s a pretty safe bet that they’ll be on their way; a rash of Googlers finding their way to TameBay from searches like “adverts on eBay” this weekend suggests that there are a few people spotting ads in new places.

One could of course take the sanguine approach: Sky TV aren’t competing with the battery charger or headphones you’re selling, so they shouldn’t distract your buyers. Indeed, if a buyer’s looking at battery chargers, they’re not looking for Sky TV so they’re never going to click the ad. Sky and eBay are wasting their time, right?

I’d love to be so calm about it, but I’m not. That £20 cashback offer is going to distract some buyers, for a start: the advertising isn’t necessarily well-targetted, but the offer is. And we’ve seen before how it goes with advertising on eBay: it starts with the likes of Sky and insurance firms, big companies who aren’t necessarily competing with eBay sellers, but it ends up with direct competition. I know I’m not the only person who’s seen my suppliers crop up in those search results’ ads. So how about if you could advertise your website on the eBay listings of all your competitors? How about if your competitors could advertise on yours?

It was just about plausible for eBay to claim that third party ads at the bottom of no-result searches were useful for buyers: if there’s nothing for them on eBay, giving them something else to look at isn’t unreasonable. But getting buyers through the process of “finding”, onto a page for something they might buy, only to send them off to buy Sky TV or home insurance, or a cheaper off-site version of what they were just looking at – I’m really not buying this as a process that’s good for anyone, including eBay.

Let’s not forget that eBay buyers are very, very loyal to the site. They come to eBay because they want to shop on eBay: they like getting feedback or they’ve bought into the security aspects or they like having many sellers’ goods aggregated in one place. Whatever the reason is, they’ve chosen to come to eBay rather than look at a search engine or a comparison shopping engine. As third-party ads proliferate on every page of the site, eBay undermine that. Buyers come to trust shopping on eBay, but when they can no longer tell the difference between an onsite and an offsite link, what happens to that trust? eBay becomes nothing more than an ugly cross between Shopping.com and Google, with nothing unique to offer. Is that a place any of us want to sell? More importantly, is it a place any of us will be bothered to try and buy?

What do you think? How will you feel when adverts crop up on your own listings? Leave us a comment.