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Sellers now know if a buyer looks at their listing!
I have been an eBay buyer circa three decades. One thing that is increasingly worrisome is that sellers somehow can tell if a buyer even looks at their listing! It is clear that sellers now have the means via some service offered by eBay to send a Special Offer if a buyer has one of their listings on a Watch List. This is fine and well because here a buyer is committing to an interest in an item sufficient to enable a seller to potentially sell an item below the original list price. This seems fair because it gives both seller and buyer further incentive to deal. But, dear community, this is what is also happening. Now, if a buyer simply looks at a listing by opening the link to the sale posting, that alone appears to send a signal to the seller that a buyer "might" be interested. In the last several months, I have received special sales offers for items I don't put on my Watch List but I have looked at the listing in detail, meaning I open the posting to inspect a postcard but never commit to placing on my Watch List. Yet, somehow, the seller knows I have inspected the item. This is getting very Big Brother and I'm uncertain the latter situation is in the best interest of the community. If a seller would care to explain how this works, I would love to learn about the protocol for this situation. I don't ever recall eBay announcing to me as a buyer how this situation works. Further, eBay makes it difficult to impossible for someone to ask eBay how this works. Looking for transparency. Thanks in advance.
al-dbaran
OP2 years agoThank you eburtonlab for the explanation about how sellers can know that a buyer has viewed an item, not simply via an added item to a Watch List but when a buyer simply looks at a listing. The only contention I have with your explanation is that the unsolicited offers that have come to me when simply viewing an item have come not when I viewed the item 2xs, as you suggest for the protocol, but offers have come when I viewed an item once! It is also curious that this happens only when I view Ebay items on an iPad, not when I view items on a desktop computer. Curious.
eburtonlab
Mentor2 years agoeBay gives sellers the opportunity to send offers to users that have added an item to a Watch List, added an item to a cart or viewed an item more than once, provided the user has not opted out of receiving such offers.
eBay mediates the offer process, so sellers only know that an offer can be made, not who is getting the offer or why. Until a user accepts an offer and pays, the seller has no idea who the buyer is.
https://www.ebay.com/sellercenter/growth/seller-hub-promotions/offers-to-buyers-best-offer