@abfabvintage wrote:
Morning, Good. Well, why then does whohou.com always have my active items listed? And perhaps the topratedseller.com isn't in eBay's radar anymore? I also know there is another site Searsmarketplace.com that promotes they are an ebay affiliate. Yet although called "Sears" you don't necessarily need to be selling Sears related items?
Since I am not one for techie language, can you explain to me what third party internet advertisers are? And assume network partners would be Google and others considered affiliates? And assume the first party ads are what I see related to other sellers being promoted on my listings. And we all know if you don't use AdBlock, you will get advertising like Geico, etc. Sorry, don't exactly understand, but trying to learn. Thanks as always for your help.
I sort of thought you might not have a full grasp of how this area works? I will try my best to explain it better.
Network partners are eBay approved companies that eBay allows to market our listings off the eBay site. All links from our items have to come back to eBay since (May 1st 2019). I have been referring to them as affiliates and they are the same thing. Network partners = Affiliate marketers.
Affiliates sites like whohou and topratedsellers and perhaps sears as you mentioned get approved from eBay to receive a feed of current listings and they can update them as often as they want. That does not mean they actually update them very often which is why you are seeing whohou having current active listings which indicates they are updating the feed to show the most current active listings while topratedseller site does not seem to have up to date active listings as you mentioned.
They then spend money advertising your listing from any number of internet advertising ways (youtube ads, google adchoice, google shopping, blogs, news articles, bing, yahoo, social media, pinterest, snapchat, twitter, facebook, etc the list is endless) which brings in potential buyers which clicks on your listing on the whohou site and it brings them to eBay to make the purchase. When this happens whohou receives a commission from eBay for bringing in the buyer.
It is very costly to do this and if you did not keep the feeds active you really will not make much money because most the links back to eBay will be to ended items. This is one of the reasons eBay made the change to GTC so the links will be much more stable and actually deliver potential buyers back to the items they were interested in on whohou.
Third party advertisers are when eBay goes to some of the advertising opportunities I mentioned above and purchases ads. Which means (1)eBay purchases ads for (2)sellers listings from a (3)third party (list in red above).
Since it appears eBay is expanding the affiliate marketing areas it makes sense to me that they quit buying the same ads the affiliates are buying (third party ads). Also the data from the third party ads is limited to a point it is probably not that useful to eBay. Earlier I mentioned eBay has ended (May 1st 2019) an advertising area called eBay Commerce (third party ads with poor data sharing) and will focus on first party ads (on eBay advertising with much better data to use in several ways).
Google is not a network partner or an approved eBay affiliate marketer (same thing). Google is a third party advertising portal ( a place you go to place internet ads and pay for them).
You mentioned earlier you wanted to increase your incoming traffic from off eBay areas, and best thing is to do this yourself. Do not worry about affiliate marketing websites or google shopping so much. You and I have no control over anything any of them do. You can start a successful social media marketing campaign with little money and a bit of time learning how it all works. You can also purchase your own third party ads if you want ( not google shopping)?
Since you have vintage items for the most part you already have a niche market of buyers and entire networks of users from what is probably a dozen social media outlets. You would be talking about your items and sharing pictures and links back to the item on eBay. This is one of the reasons eBay went to GTC, so sellers like you and I can share our items off eBay with stable links coming back to a real active item. You also will not have to keep track of which items on your social media areas need updating because the GTC will retain the same URL address which will create more traffic and hopefully more sales.
Sellers who end there listing every 29 days or so will not have stable links in there off eBay advertising back to the item on eBay.
You might say why did eBay not do this earlier? I agree with the question and the best answer I have is since eBay was doing a lot of third party advertising on there own and now they have ended that path (May 1st 2019), they see a big opportunity for sellers and affiliate sites to do some of this themselves with a more stable way (GTC Listings) to make it work successfully.
Good Luck Selling!
