Is there a connection between eBays Spring cleaning and the removal of Sponsored ads within listings

[timemachine777]

What's your take? I find it very interesting and timely that while eBay decides to purge all the sponsored ad links within all the listings that they made affiliate fees from, They launch the Spring cleaning campaign to rid the site of all the older listings that they no longer need for all of those sponsored ads that were removed.

In the two decades that eBay has been around, they could care less about how old a sellers active listing were as they pushed the GTC (Good Till Canceled) option. Now they do claim that the ads were removed so that they could make room for their new fee based highest bidder search placement promoted listing program. 

I can see that they can't have both the promoted listings and the 3rd party sponsored ads, and all the other ads in the sellers product listings. The product being offered for sale would be lost among the already eBay cluttered listing.

The big difference between the these two products is that it benefited eBay to have as many active listings on the site as possible to load them up with the sponsored ads, because at the least, eBay got a click fee from the sponsors, and the chance to make a very high commission if a buyer portal jumps to the sponsors site through the ad an buys something there. 

Those listings were all used as portal bait for affiliate fees that eBay would get. However the Promoted ads do not work the same way as eBay only makes money if the your item sells within the 30 days the item was clicked on by the buyer. (But there's no way for a seller to really know if their item was bought from a promoted listing placement or a reg search placement, or better yet, a buyer rummaging through their active inventory. Which is another issue altogether). 

So eBay would no longer benefit from a site loaded with whatever someone wants to list for sale. It would actually benefit eBay to have a more slimmed down site with quicker selling items, as it would reduce eBay's storage, server, and bandwidth costs. So in the end it's less about the sellers profits and more about eBay's profits as par course.

[cell.buyer]

They are not going to comment on them because there is too much programming and recoding that has to take place before they can even deal with it, in the mean time the Titanic is sinking due to these ill advised and not thought out policy changes, eBay can't even figure out how to deal with the UPC issues sellers are raising, so there is nothing an eBay rep can do until the programming is changed.

This is going to doom eBay.

[timemachine777]

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@copper.boom wrote:

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@timemachine777 wrote:

One would have been a disaster for the other before, whereas now one benefits the other. That's the connection I was looking at.

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I really don't think it would have been a disaster before, nor do I think one is the reason for the other now. As I said above, while there are exceptions (such as duplicates), a lot of what's being removed are "stale" listings with little to no activity. Those long-tail items don't often generate much in the way of traffic because they need the right buyer, so the 3rd party click revenue generated from those listings was probably quite minimal.

I just don't think it's as big of an impact as you do.

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Yes it would have since eBay needed as many as possible for portal bait. That's another reason why all the monthly free promos of 1000 to 2000 listings per month was launched years ago. eBay needed loads of listings to create a place for as many as possible ad placements.

As for stale listing vs click through. I have lots of listings that regularly get over a 100 visits per month and have been listed for a year or more. That's a lot of chances to for eBay to make extra money every time someone accesses that listing and engages with one of the ads within it. If I average 1500 visits in a years from lets say one of them, and my item is 100.00, eBay makes 10 bucks plus 10% on shipping fees. 

Now lets say only 2 people actually purchased a comparable item on another site using the ad portals in my listing. That fee could will exceed the 10 bucks that they would have made from me if my item sold. Plus we still haven't est. how many buyers would have, at the least clicked on one of the numerous ads within my listing, to generate a click fee for eBay and also add a cookie to the buyers computer for possible future kickbacks from future visits to the other site by that person.

[timemachine777]

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@cell.buyer wrote:

They are not going to comment on them because there is too much programming and recoding that has to take place before they can even deal with it, in the mean time the Titanic is sinking due to these ill advised and not thought out policy changes, eBay can't even figure out how to deal with the UPC issues sellers are raising, so there is nothing an eBay rep can do until the programming is changed.

This is going to doom eBay.

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I know that's true. I was just talking to an eBay rep the other night about the layering effect that all this bad code is having on the eBay platform. We were discussing the fact that all this new code being layered over all the old code is having a negative impact on the site as a whole.

That doesn't include all the other issues that the tech dept is dealing with in regards to apps and tools not working they way they thought they would. He just laughed and said they really have their hands full right now. Which is something that other reps have said also.

[cell.buyer]

eBay really can't deal with what sellers really think of them, that is a fact.

http://www.ecommercebytes.com/C/blog/blog.pl?/comments/2017/5/1496088624.html/1/0#comments

[z50com]

eBay is not hurting for storage space!

If they were they wouldn't keep listings like this in the archives.

Look how old this ad of mine is and it's still on their servers!

http://www.ebay.com/itm/huck-352-rivet-gun-riveter-pulls-c6l-huck-bolts-peterbilt-grill-fasteners-/3...

[timemachine777]

I didn't think that they were hurting for space. I felt that they no longer needed all these listings around because they removed the sponsored ads from within them. I did get a kick out of the fact that when I clicked on the original listing link, the Wharton business school ad was there to greet me. It's be dogging me for a few days now.

[timemachine777]

I wasn't just stale listings getting deleted. About 15 months ago eBay purged over 400 listings on one of my accounts that had just ended. Over 100 of those listings were brand new.

[z50com]

You have to admit that the listing pages look way better without all those ads on them.

I think it was a major improvement.

[cell.buyer]

Why did they do that ?

Did they delete them from the database or did they go into unsolds ?

eBay and all their bright ideas are going to doom the corporation, they need to keep solds and unsolds in the sellers MyeBay for much longer than they do now, at least a year, eBay is selling themselves and the sellers short with ill advised policy imagined by uninspired executives.

[tunicaslot]

Are you two as miserable in the real world or just on the net? Do you always blame someone else for mistakes you make?

For months you've been on here complaining about sponsored ads - now they're gone and you're still complaining. Ebay was probably not seeing as much revenue through the sponsored ads as most times - they reflected how much better a price someone could get on Ebay and people did not click thru.

The only time they clicked thru was when a sponsored ad was cheaper than what sellers (dropshippers) were selling it on Ebay for.

Ebay is not going to make much off of promoted listing as many of us are only giving them an addition 1%-5% and because we raise our prices to cover those fees - if people search by price lowest to highest most of our listings will be on back pages.

There are a few of you we have tried to help increase your sales - but you'll have none of it - you're going to sell elsewhere ect... Obviously if you have moved your products - you are spending as much time cultivating the new venue as you did here on Ebay to produce sales - none - because you are too busy starting thread after thread about Big Bad Ebay.

You two are like our comedy relief here now - so continue to post - as we need a break sometimes from actually helping people.

[timemachine777]

Your not kidding. I always hated them. I remember how happy I was back in Feb of 2015 when eBay removed them all, only to put them all back a few months later. I like nice clean listings that I can quickly scan for the content that I need to see in relation to what I clicked on to possibly buy in the first place.

I don't want to see a cluttered page full of ads and unrelated text. It's too distracting and I end up hitting the back button because it's just to much visual noise.

[timemachine777]

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@cell.buyer wrote:

Why did they do that ?

Did they delete them from the database or did they go into unsolds ?

eBay and all their bright ideas are going to doom the corporation, they need to keep solds and unsolds in the sellers MyeBay for much longer than they do now, at least a year, eBay is selling themselves and the sellers short with ill advised policy imagined by uninspired executives.

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When I called CS about it, and nobody could give me and answer except that someone would follow up with me in 48 to 72 hrs, which never happened. When they ended, which was normal, they went to my unsold section, and a few days later I went in to revise some and do my regular relists, and most of my listings were gone, and eBay reps, couldn't figure out a way to get them back. They claimed that it wasn't a glitch, and that was as much info as I could get out of CS.

Aside from the ones that I had just created, I had to cross reference all my other active and unsold listings with my TL inventory so that I could upload the missing ones again on eBay, and at the same time avoid a duplicate listing violation, if I accidentally uploaded an active listing. What a nightmare that was. 

[cell.buyer]

Could be that the database servers were hacked and they lost the records, I have seen Russian hackers hack into a blog database and replace the SQL database with their own spam redirection content.

So anything is possible, the only way we could get the blog network back online was to restore from a database that was much older.

[timemachine777]

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@tunicaslot wrote:

Are you two as miserable in the real world or just on the net? Do you always blame someone else for mistakes you make?

For months you've been on here complaining about sponsored ads - now they're gone and you're still complaining. Ebay was probably not seeing as much revenue through the sponsored ads as most times - they reflected how much better a price someone could get on Ebay and people did not click thru.

The only time they clicked thru was when a sponsored ad was cheaper than what sellers (dropshippers) were selling it on Ebay for.

Ebay is not going to make much off of promoted listing as many of us are only giving them an addition 1%-5% and because we raise our prices to cover those fees - if people search by price lowest to highest most of our listings will be on back pages.

There are a few of you we have tried to help increase your sales - but you'll have none of it - you're going to sell elsewhere ect... Obviously if you have moved your products - you are spending as much time cultivating the new venue as you did here on Ebay to produce sales - none - because you are too busy starting thread after thread about Big Bad Ebay.

You two are like our comedy relief here now - so continue to post - as we need a break sometimes from actually helping people.

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I'm euphoric, also I have aced the MMPI as a child and as an adult. I just call them as I see them. 

[timemachine777]

They claimed that I was the only one that had called in with that issue. I will say that it never happened again. Also the Spring cleaning hasn't affected me yet. I gotta cut this one short, I'm being asked to go pick up the Chinese dinners that were just ordered. I like how I just got elected for that run. See ya.