eBay.com remove shop modules from search results
by Chris Dawson
eBay shop owners in the US are up in arms about what’s perceived as lower visibility for eBay.com stores. eBay are due to remove two Stores promotions from the search results page today – removing the “Get More Results module” at the bottom of search results which will be reduced to a “See additional items from eBay Stores” text link and removing entirely the “Matching eBay Stores” module from the left sidebar.
Removing the graphics used to build these modules will result in faster page 
loads and eBay say that faster page loads directly correlate to more sales. They also say that they don’t see many clicks to these two sections of the search result pages so impact should be minimal.
In the mean time many UK sellers are still sore at losing the Shops tab from the top of eBay pages. Personally I think there’s less justification for keeping that page element – On eBay UK there are no Shop Inventory Format (SIF) listings left, every item is in main search. There really is no need to direct buyers to a shops search to reveal additional items when every item is visible in the main site search. That’s not the case on eBay.com where SIF listings still exist and 10s of 1000s of items can’t be found from the main site search.
Removing shops visibility is always a touchy subject for eBay sellers, but do the modules really make a difference to sales? I’m pretty sure that there are some strong opinions out there but ultimately eBay are the only ones who see the full click through rates for the definitive answer. What’s your gut feeling though? Do the shops links make a difference to your sales on eBay?
Via Auctionbytes
10 Responses on "eBay.com remove shop modules from search results"
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Gotta say with my buyer head on, I click “matching stores” quite a lot.
Thankfully then (at least at the moment) there’s no indication it’ll be going from eBay UK
Sue same here, the matching stores function is useful
It is nice that eBay is finally acknowledging that their site is slow and buyers want a faster site. I’ve seen that complaint on the forums for over a year.
However if they really want to improve page loading times how about removing the huge flash banner for Verizon?
Removing the shops tab on the left handside will remove 5 direct links to our shop.
Hardly news to make me reach for the champagne. Fingers crossed they leave the UK alone.
Have to agree with eBuyer, the whole site would run alot quicker without flash add’s all over the site, surely if you come to eBay to buy something then thats what you want to do or you may aswell just use google search.
Thankfully I use AdBlock Pro, so no silly flash for me.
I use the Matching eBay Stores links on the left side alot! I think its a mistake to remove them in the UK hopefully they wont do it in the UK aswell.
eBay’s comment about the load time makes me laugh.
The shop links are HTML and take NO time to load.
How long do they think all the flash banners take to load?
Chris I disagree with you. Shop owners pay a fee. And part of the fee is for the shop to be advertised.
Again, eBay are ripping off the sellers. And ultimately eBay will pay the price.
Have to agree eBay’s reason is laughable and kind of insulting to anyone with any knowledge of HTML. Get rid of an advert or two instead.
That was my first thought but it really does impact load times. What you have is a dynamically generated webpage that pulls bits and pieces from different places. Basically they are cutting the time it takes to figure out which stores are related to the search. I would assume eBay has a server farm that handles that sort of thing and probably does it faster than my computer can render flash (especially since I run Linux).
Thats a blow.
I list on .co.uk but pay ISV upgrade for all my modest auctions.
A number of searches got my UK Shop to show in that ‘matching shops’ box.
The stores tab at the top and the see all matching eBay stores links only return .com shops so won’t help me at all.
So my ISV upgrades are now worth less than before.
eBay are known sometimes to be economic with the truth and I don’t buy the page load times reason either.
Much more likely to be to do with the ‘tests’ being run on .com with the ‘temporary test of store inventory format items appearing in search results’ and not wanting to skew the results.
See post of 15th October in:
http://announcements.ebay.com/category/general-announcements/