eBay encouraged sellers to post links to their Store on social media platforms using a new feature that it officially announced on Monday. “You can now link your Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or Pinterest accounts right to your Storefront and easily manage all of your social platforms on your new Seller Hub Social page,” it announced on April 17th.
eBay had made the feature available to some sellers earlier this year, and officially announced it in some markets in early April, including the UK.
The new marketing feature, available only to sellers with an eBay Store subscription, allows sellers to use their existing social media accounts to generate interest through custom posts, hashtags, and images – allowing sellers to manage their posts on social media platforms directly from eBay’s Seller Hub.
Some sellers questioned why they would drive traffic to eBay where they have to pay fees rather than to their own shops. And since eBay plasters ads and similar items for sale by other sellers on listing pages, it benefits eBay as much or more than the individual sellers doing the sharing.
In 2021, Vice President of eBay Stores Tom Pinckney had promised sellers a substantial fee reduction for driving sales from their social channels to their eBay store (“eBay to Offer Reduced Fees for Social Sharing”). However, in this month’s announcements, there was no mention of any incentives, and Pinckney has since left eBay and now works at Amazon.
When a seller asked about the fee reductions for social sharing during this month’s monthly chat session, a moderator responded, “No information has been released on this yet, but we will share if we hear more.” Note that eBay does allow sellers to join its affiliate program, providing details on the eBay Partner Network portal.
Sellers discussed the new eBay social sharing feature in EcommerceBytes’ April 8th post, “eBay Adds Social Sharing Integration on Seller Hub.“
“Tom Pinckney had promised sellers a substantial fee reduction for driving sales from their social channels to their eBay store (“eBay to Offer Reduced Fees for Social Sharing”).”
Sounds like Managed Payments – promised a lower cost and then . . . raise the cost to the sellers.
How long will it take for eBay to take away the fee reduction?
If you are going to put all the work promoting your items on the various social medias, just get your own website and make that promoting work for you and leave eBay out of your business.
I noticed eBay is on a blitz they’re eBay presence seems to be amped up.
Why dilute your brand by generating more backlinks to the eBay domain. if anything how do you know you’re not? The fact that they rolled this out without the reduction to sellers seems to me that its not part of the consideration to begin with. Do you like being used.. If they don’t get enough user adoption then they give you crumbs. No one deploys programs without measurement controls. You are being played. Is this how you guys focus on the core marketplace? Action matters, their words are meaningless until its starts with “We let you down…
just another fleecebay scheme that won’t work
The biggest issue with linking to your listings from your social medias, is the links they provide are absolutely atrocious. They are insane with endless tracking info.
They are like 500 characters long. You can’t provide the link in an Instagram post because it is impossible for a buyer to type it in.