Sellers were quite upset when eBay moved sales banners that offered incentives to shoppers from the top of listing pages down to the bottom of the page underneath descriptions.
When sellers run promotions (such as, “Buy 1, get 1 at 25% off”), banners appear at the top of listings, helping to get shoppers’ attention. But in late January, eBay moved the banners underneath the listing description – despite the fact eBay urges sellers to run sales on their listings.
A moderator explained the reason eBay moved the promos down the page: “I can confirm that this is an intentional change as our initial testing showed an increase in sales when the promotion was moved closer to the description. We are keeping a close eye on this and we assure you that if this leads to a reduction of sales for our sellers, we will look into reverting back to the previous format.”
On February 21st, an EcommerceBytes reader noted the banners had returned to the top of the page – and continued to appear at the bottom of listings as well.
During Wednesday’s weekly chat, a moderator confirmed that this too was intentional: “This is an intentional change. We will continue to monitor the performance of the placement moving forward.”
It’s not clear why eBay made the change in the first place since the banners provide an incentive for shoppers to make a purchase, and it would be interesting to know how the change impacted sales.
Sellers are discussing the issue on this blog post.
I very closely monitored this fiasco, both on eBay’s community board and their social media team’s responses.
Clearly it doesn’t take an ecom marketing genius to recognize that moving the promo banner “below the fold” near the bottom of the listing was an asinine move and would reduce sellers’ promo uptake.
I still believe their intention was (is) to free up more “surface area” screen real-estate to continue to shoehorn-in more promoted listings, moreso than any real effectiveness metric on the promo placement location factored in this move (anyone else notice the occasional lineup of other similar items at the TOP of listings, of which the 1st is a promoted item)?
What concerned me more is the complete lack of transparency from eBay about moving the banner, and that even their own internal communication is so poor none of these critical front-end changes had been communicated to their own support teams.
Note that eBay has also confirmed that your promotions won’t necessarily even appear in search results at all, but this hasn’t garnered the backlash the promo banner move on the listing page (but it should, since if your promo doesn’t appear in search results it can’t influence views and conversions).