eBay testing reduced visibility for eBay Stores

[mandy]

From ChannelAdvisor Scot Wingo's blog:

Sellers are reporting that eBay either has some unusual bugginess or they are doing some A/B testing on store discoverability...

For the last two weeks, sellers have been speculating something is coming because this page changed.

Under the “Promote Your Store” section, it used to offer more exposure to higher-end stores and now as you can see, there is no increased exposure on eBay.

Then I started to get reports that sellers store traffic was dropping. Then sellers started to notice that the “Shop eBay Stores” box was not showing up on some SERPs (I unfortunately don’t have a screen shot of this).   Still others have reported that instead of sponsored listings showing up on null search results they have replaced store discoverability (I have not seen that or a screen shot of it)...

Finally, a seller yesterday was able to get a screen shot that showed an interesting twist.  eBay had replaced the store discoverability with eBay Express listings...

full article: http://ebaystrategies.blogs.com/ebay_str...ng_re.html

from rksmythe's blog:

A friend of mine suggested I search on the word "twine" and see if I came up with the same result as she did. The screen capture above is the result I received. It may be difficult to read but this result showed more than 30 CORE items (in fact there were over 200 items in CORE )and then directly below the Core listings on the first page of search were Express listings. No store listings were to be found. It was indeed a test because I asked some other sellers across the country to do the same search and they received normal results.

Now, what are we to make of this test? It appears that eBay wants to determine the most productive method for displaying Express items in eBay.com search and this was one attempt. I would imagine this approach would not go over well with either Core Sellers or Store Sellers...

full article: http://rksmythe.blogspot.com/2007/04/wha...sting.html

[sneakymagenta]

[bargainbloodhound]

Poor Sneaky.    On a happier note, May is the 1-year annversary of my last listing on eBay

eBay wants to determine the most productive method for displaying Express items in eBay.com search and this was one attempt. I would imagine this approach would not go over well with either Core Sellers or Store Sellers

It would go over well with them if Express actually had buyers...which it doesn't.  We haven't had a single sale on Express since our Half items were added to it a few weeks ago.

[chiquita]

The pinks have already posted a denial. Does Ebay go into panic mode every time they hear Scott Wingo has posted on his blog?

[dimucci]

http://forums.ebay.com/db2/thread.jspa?t...1000485642&tstart=0&mod=1177959540052

The bolded text is a repeat of what eBaY said last Spring right before they decided store inventory was clutter.

Clarification: Store Inventory and eBay Express in Search
Apr-30-07 11:59 PDT
Hi everyone,

As a follow-up to Jake Jake’s post at last week’s Brown Bag Lunch, I wanted to quickly stop by to clear up the recent confusion about the Store Inventory expansion module in search results.

On the 22nd we had a glitch where the Store Inventory expansion module (which displays up to 30 Store Inventory listings when 30 or fewer Auction-style and Fixed Price listings are found in search) wasn’t displaying when it should be. This also affected the Shop eBay Stores module in the left navigation. This was fixed within a few hours of it hitting the site, and we’re sorry that it happened.

In the past day we’ve received questions about Scot Wingo’s blog post theorizing that we had replaced the Store Inventory module with an eBay Express module. This is not the case. There are different rules for when the Express module displays, and if you look at the example he uses, there are over 5 pages of results that were returned for that search. Since the Store Inventory module displays when 30 or fewer listings are found, it wouldn’t have displayed regardless of whether Express was there or not. This is working as it’s supposed to - we’re not swapping out the Store Inventory module for Express. Some people have also contacted us asking if these two incidents were related as part of us testing how to give Store Inventory more or less exposure on the site. The answer to that is no – these were completely separate, and not part of any test. We are committed to increasing the value of eBay Stores and the Store Inventory listing format, not decreasing it.

I hope this clears things up!

Regards, Darlene

eBay Stores

[BellisimaJ.]

Darlene and Jake Jake are so truthful. :