Comment by duped
9 months ago
What if eBay were the only way to sell your goods on the internet? Because that's what the problem is with search - if Google doesn't weight your page high enough in results you're screwed. There's no other game in town.
eBay already acts like it still is the only place to sell goods on the internet. But I'd say eBay was actually better back when it was the only mainstream way/place to sell many goods on the internet.
eBay now sells promoted rankings. Funny when a vendor selling 1 product has it listed at several different prices, so you can save some money by finding the lowest priced one in their "other listings" that they don't promote.
eBay sells Google ads on its pages. (sad seller noises).
and eBay is one of the biggest ad buyers on Google.
And that's why I utilized eBay's api to create a better, curated version of their site for personal use. On average my filters end up removing like 90% of the listings for various reasons. All I see is the stuff that is actually worth considering now. It's great.
I find eBay's optimizations have made it somewhat toxic.
Once you get to a product page, any further navigation of the form "similar/related products" is sponsored listings only these days.
They've narrowed a catalog that might have 1,000 relevant products into a pinball bouncing you between the same 12 sponsored listings. It's easy to figure "this is all they've got" and move on.
The model probably works okay for rebadged Alibaba tat with no meaningful differentiation; the 200 sellers with the same widget can be forced to bid against each other for visibility.
But for the classic line of "eBay as the world's garage sale", the last thing you want is to deliberately narrow your visible inventory. Customers are here for variety and the obscure, and restricting the market to "that which we can get placement revenue from" eventually drains them away.