This is technically the next post in a series that overviews eBay’s Seller Updates from an SEO point of view.
I haven’t been this fired up since I told Devin Wenig to take down eBay’s “SEO pages.”
This post is timed with the 2024 October Seller Update and is supposed to be its review.
But of course, there’s nothing to report.
I remember a time when Seller Updates carried some genuine weight.
Sellers dreaded them, but at least they knew eBay was actually doing something.
Little did we know then that eBay would become so good at resting on its laurels.
I initially told myself that this wouldn’t be a rant. Just a wakeup call.
I was wrong.
It’s a rant.
So let’s get the boring stuff over with.
The Update didn’t update anything
Here are the highlights of eBay’s recent and useless seller update:
- An AI-driven image tool that encourages sellers to waste their time removing one background, only to replace it with another — in spite of the fact that all of ecommerce uses and recommends white backgrounds.
- The addition of a bar graph to its Marketing tab, and yet another reminder that eBay has reorganized the page — including calling out the earth-shattering step of “renam[ing] ‘Promotions’ as ‘Discounts’ for more clarity.”
- Did you know eBay has a Product Research tool? Finally available through the app, it’s been in Seller Hub for over four years. But yeah, eBay has a Product Research tool. One more time: eBay has a Product Research tool!
- eBay wants to loan you money!
- An increase to the item value limit on transactions to Canada.
- The removal of negative or neutral feedback in two additional instances.
Now onto why I’m writing this thing. (“Hey, I’m walking here!”)
The minions don’t get it
An eBay “growth advisor” recently reached out to one of our clients, with the usual promise of increased sales.
We decided to go ahead and let him do his best.
And the results were incredible.
Incredibly bad, but nevertheless very hard to believe.
If you know anything about Promoted Offsite ads, you know that it’s the one campaign type on eBay that requires an initial “ramp-up period” to train its learning algorithm — and it lasts a minimum of four weeks.
As eBay has stated plainly, “With Offsite Ads, patience is key for success.”
So what does the guy do? He ends our campaign.
Instead of tweaking the daily budget (which is the only aspect of Promoted Offsite sellers can currently update), he just ends it.
The advisor’s new campaign? Same daily budget.
He literally just recreated our old campaign.
Except that now, it has to go through the learning period all over again.
This move resulted in sales through Offsite ads plummeting by 39.8%.
And return on ad spend (ROAS) was reduced by 34.7%.
But it gets worse.
This moron went on to brag that his new campaign was “hugely successful.”
Why? Because “the gold standard for ROAS on e-commerce is 3.”
All but one of our current clients would be quite unhappy with a ROAS of three.
The measurement varies widely by niche, and there is certainly no “gold standard” ROAS across ecommerce.
The same advisor also created a single pay-per-click campaign using smart targeting — that generated no sales.
eBay’s dutiful rep described the new PPC campaign as follows:
“Low numbers to start, as we are using all listings for lights that have been on eBay for over 2 years without selling. This will all change with one or two sales, so is definitely worth keeping active for now. We are looking for this to be over 2.5 for a stellar campaign, and 3 is the gold standard.”
This, on a campaign with a ROAS of 0. Zero!
Unlike Promoted Listings General and Offsite, Promoted Listings Priority ads do not generally gain “momentum” with time.
If anything, they will sometimes cool a bit.
It is simply wrong to suggest in the context of pay per click that, “This will all change with one or two sales.”
No, stupid, it won’t.
And of course, he totally nails his final analysis by once again referring to the ecommerce “gold standard” ROAS of three — adding, “We are looking for this to be over 2.5 for a steller [sic] campaign” for good measure.
As I seem to be saying all the time now, you just can’t make this stuff up.
In regards to its advisors, eBay is doing one of three things:
(1) Sending them into the world with no training at all, cutting them loose to say whatever tripe enters their brains.
(2) Doing a half-baked job of advisor training, and then just abandoning them to their own devices.
(3) Training them specifically to say whatever they need to in order to increase sellers’ ad spending.
As I’ve watched multiple growth advisors at eBay just read off their computer screens (I’ve even gone as far as to compare the presentations of two advisors in order to uncover exact wording that was repeated), I favor option two.
Let’s hope that eBay has simply resolved itself to being mediocre, and not something more sinister.
The money grab isn’t working
Why have I regaled you with this madness?
Because it’s one of many recent indications that eBay has resorted to the pursuit of a money grab.
And it’s failing. Miserably.
Take, for instance, a recent call I had with a member of eBay’s Strategic Partnerships program.
After 15 minutes of hemming and hawing, I finally said, “So let me get this straight. Your one reason for reaching out to List Rank Sell is to incentivize us to sell ads to your sellers. Is that correct?”
His response: “Yes.”
That was the substance of the entire conversation.
So it wasn’t really a surprise when talks abruptly ended after I refused to sign the open-ended non-disclosure agreement with eBay — a document applying to the company as a whole, not the department.
It was barely one page and the broadest NDA I’ve ever seen.
But I do still get my reminder email to sign it every three days or so.
Which I’ve been receiving for at least three months.
I guess that’s something to be proud of, right?
This concentration on revenue is widespread, as it rears its head around seemingly every corner.
In last week’s quarterly earnings call, eBay CFO Steve Priest made the following startling admission:
“We do expect advertising to continue to grow faster than GMV, driven by the momentum in first-party Promoted Listings and Offsite ads.”
In case you missed it, ad revenue at eBay has remained stagnant at $2.6 billion for four straight quarters.
That’s an entire year.
And yet eBay believes revenue will “grow” faster than gross merchandise volume. How is this possible?
Because a year ago GMV was at $18.6 billion, before it began to trend downwards and finally settled last quarter at $18.3 billion.
Stagnation (revenue) does beat decline (GMV), after all.
I guess these days according to eBay, key financial indicators that don’t decrease actually represent growth.
I can’t imagine that that logic would work for any seller, however.
In spite of the model’s clear failures, eBay has doubled down on its strategy to “increase” revenue — while appearing to all but give up on an improved GMV.
This is not a good sign, and it doesn’t bode well for eBay’s near future.
The puff piece didn’t persuade anyone
One of the strangest things we’ve seen in a while was a bit of greatly exaggerated eBay PR on Forbes.
The author, who ignored us when we publicly called him out, decided to entitle his little puff piece, “The Secret to eBay’s Phenomenal Customer Experience.”
This jaw-droppingly inaccurate title rests atop a weak excuse for an “article” that is no more than a brief summary of a conversation with an eBay exec named Derek Allgood.
Instead of talking to one of eBay’s C-suite boys and simply taking his word for it, perhaps the author should have talked to an actual customer — like any buyer or seller who’s had to call eBay customer service.
We are told that this same executive has been making the rounds, clearly in an effort to spread the good news of eBay.
Unfortunately, this pile of doggie doo wouldn’t convince even the biggest fans of eBay that their customer service is “phenomenal.”
The data isn’t what it used to be
While eBay reminds us update after update that they have a product research tool called, well, Product Research, what they have failed to mention is the recent removal of a major piece of its most useful information.
As our clients are invested sellers — the counterpart to eBay’s enthusiast buyers — the Total Item Sales metric was a central component of our process.
This metric measured the total gross sales on eBay for any category that could be clearly identified using the tool.
And then suddenly, and inexplicably, it was gone.
The Total Item Sales metric was invaluable, allowing sellers to follow the trajectory of their product market on eBay, assured them of when market downturns were temporary, and helped them understand the changes we made to their marketing strategy.
When eBay removed this data (along with the Total Sold metric), it encouraged sellers to give up on paid marketing, helped to eliminate seller business expansion during downturns, took away the ability to measure the health of their product market on eBay, and dispensed with essential ad spend guidance.
I have said much about eBay’s historic commitment to data openness, including:
- The internet’s first open API in 2000.
- eBay’s stated commitment to open source, starting in 2011.
- Joining the OpenAPI initiative in 2017.
- Integration of Terapeak’s data as of 2020.
The eBay that did these open data things seems like a long way off in the past, with the company’s recent removal of some of that data calling into question its devotion to the concept.
The stupid claims…
One of the more inane and utterly confounding statements made by eBay came from CEO Jamie Iannone during the Q2 2024 earnings call.
A sports trading card seller, Burbank Sportscards, had just left eBay.
When asked about their departure, Iannone sidestepped the question entirely and said he refused to “talk about any one seller; we have millions of sellers on the platform.”
The problem was, Burbank maintained an inventory of over 40 million cards.
You would think that losing a focus category seller of that size would have mattered to eBay. Mattered greatly, in fact.
But instead, Iannone walked on by like a grocery store shopper ducking to avoid a homeless person.
This response becomes even more ludicrous when viewed in light of the move eBay had made just one month prior.
In June of this year, Markets Insider wrote an article about how Seagate “collaborated” with eBay to open a certified refurbished hard drive store on the marketplace.
eBay then highlighted the piece, contradicting Iannone’s assertion that eBay wasn’t interested in discussing “any one seller.”
But what makes this entire exchange totally insane, is that Seagate’s eBay store — the one that required a collaboration between two Fortune 500 companies and which eBay wanted everyone in the world to know about — contains all of 11 listings.
Seagate “collaborated” with eBay to open a certified refurbished hard drive store on the marketplace. eBay then highlighted the piece, contradicting Iannone’s assertion that eBay wasn’t interested in discussing “any one seller.” But what makes this entire exchange totally insane, is that Seagate’s eBay store — the one that required a collaboration between two Fortune 500 companies and which eBay wanted everyone in the world to know about — contains all of 11 listings.
…and the dumb changes
And then there’s the seller feedback issue everybody’s talking about.
Chris Dawson of ChannelX reported on confusing changes made to eBay’s process for leaving seller feedback.
The layout now places front and center a new “Rate this item” product rating feature that looks very similar to the feature used to leave seller feedback.
As a result, sellers are reporting lower numbers of feedback ratings. In some cases, significantly lower.
This is likely due to buyers leaving product ratings, thinking they’re leaving feedback.
And I’ve got to tell you, this looks intentional — as a way of artificially increasing the “trust factor” of items on the site.
At the expense of sellers.
Dawson also reported on eBay UK’s newly announced Buyer-Facing Fee, said to be coming next year.
It is theorized that this new fee will resemble similar “buyer protection fees” already in place elsewhere.
Private sellers in the UK are now selling largely fee free, while buyers are going to be forced to pay more.
It makes absolutely no sense to me.
The conclusion is an old one — and a new one
It seems like right now, all we have is problems. One after the other.
But the answer to what sellers should do in the face of them is the same that it’s ever been.
Continue on. Stay the course.
It is still possible to do well on eBay.
But now, sellers need to understand that they are truly on their own.
At present, the belief that eBay knows what it’s doing is an illusion.
eBay is clearly most interested in increasing its own revenue.
And they’re not even good at doing that.
On the other hand, sellers will need to become very good at paid advertising if they hope to survive — even those that have fully optimized listings.
And they will have to depend on their own wits to navigate eBay’s landscape, which at the moment is little less than a minefield.
We’re not eBay haters. We never have been, and we never will be.
We make our living serving serious sellers.
As a matter of fact, we are currently experiencing an increase in business.
I would not be slamming eBay if I didn’t have a reason. And I assure you, I do.
I had other things planned for this post, but as I continued to write it I realized that there was just one, central message.
The conclusion is clear.
Iannone’s gotta go.
Keep your chin up.
