The promotion includes the Featured Immediately enhancement which randomly selects five listings for showcased visibility on the first page of search results. This is available either for the first seven days or the entire duration of the listing.

eBay Italy have a 30 day listing format costing as little as €0.01 for premium shop owners and best matched items with the most sales get priority. By using Featured Immediately sellers are able to artificially promote their listings in best match so this is a valuable feature to use for multiple item listings.

Two other enhancements are included in the promo – Featured Plus and visibility Plus Package which includes Bold, Border, Highlight, Featured Immediately, and Featured Plus. The promotion runs from the 8th to the 15th of July

In addition to the standard listing lengths there will be a new 30 days format BIN which can be automatically renewed. Gallery will be free on all listings from June.

At the same time new Shops will be introduced – Base, Plus and Premium, with varying insertion fees. Sellers who select the Premium Shop costing €99.95/mth will have free BIN listings until August 31st, and from then on the cost will be just €0.01.

Best Match will be introduced for fixed price listings although Auctions will still appear with ending soonest sort. In order to advantage the longer listing formats multiple item listings with the MOST sold items will appear first in search results. It becomes more important to list multiple quantity items than duplicate listings of a single item (which many sellers have done in the past to increase visibility).

There will also be a new Showcase feature, using Showcase will allow sellers to buy their way to the top of Best Match in order to gain sales, once they have sales the listings will rise to the top of Best Match on their own merit.

Seller Standards will become more important than ever on eBay Italy. Not only will sellers with poor feedback, excessive shipping, or multiple INR complaints be disadvantaged in search, they will also lose the right to open Plus or Premium eBay shops and access to virtually free listings.

Working towards free insertion fees is a stated long term aim for eBay. Italy is the first country to experiment with this and if it’s a success we can see it introduced in other eBay territories, possibly as soon as Autumn this year.

Italians love their motors, and rightly so – they have an impressive heritage. I once had a friend who worked for an Italian company who insisted their sales reps drove Italian cars, they wouldn’t supply a Ferrairi, he wouldn’t drive a Fiat, so he settled for an Alfa Romeo. And that’s what the eBay Italy Motors blog is all about. It’s not all supercars, it’s not all mundane motors but it does rave about the affordable but special Motors you could buy on eBay.

In line with eBay’s general policy of discouraging reserve prices, these have been increased by 50%:

eBay.it’s current fee schedule says that until 30th September, media categories will benefit from their own fee schedule: 5c insertion fees and 9% FVFs. There’s currently no word as to whether this tariff will stay or not: it’s always been announced as a promotion rather than an actual fee change, and was last due to end in June.

What might this indicate for the UK? I’d expect reserve fees to go up: eBay don’t like reserves, buyers don’t like reserves, and some sites like eBay Spain have already got rid of reserve prices altogether. An increase on BIN fees wouldn’t surprise me either: 6p to add BIN to an auction is currently one of the more keenly priced fees on eBay’s site, and can be used as a lucrative (if rather risky) way to keep your insertion fees to a minimum. I’d expect this to be increased to around 10p here.

Of course, there’s been no word of fee changes in either the UK or Germany yet. Either the smaller European sites are getting their news out of the way first, or we’re getting off lightly this summer. I know where I’d lay my bet

I do like the way that anything offbeat can end up on this page, and it’ll only stay at the top if enough other eBayers vote to keep it there. I’m hoping the site won’t get gamed in the same way that pulse does, but time will tell on that.

Either way is a fun new way to keep buyers engaged on eBay as well as a great way to encourage bidding on auctions. I like it, now where’s the UK version?

Although each classified advert has to be for a specific product they are designed to solicit enquires from buyers for similar products the seller has for sale. With Classified Ads there is an insertion fee, but no final value fee, and in fact the actual transaction is carried out off eBay, with no feedback given.

Extending Classified Ad format into a new category on a seasonal basis is a new tactic for eBay, and one that they’ll be watching closely. If successful we can expect to see similar promotions on other eBay sites, in different categories, and at other times of year.

The promotion runs between the 21st and 25th May and reviews generated prior to this date don’t qualify so everyone has an equal opportunity to participate.

I really like this competion, with visibility of eBay listings dropping out of Google, encouraging rich search engine friendly content makes sense. Even if you don’t sell the products directly related to your reviews they will not only attract search engine traffic to eBay, but buyers can click through to your eBay listings and discover what you do sell. I’d really like eBay.co.uk to run a promotion like this!

Though it smacks a little bit of desperation, it’s nice to see a European site that isn’t the UK or Germany getting a little attention.