The Return of the Auction Format
Filed Under Sellers' Insights
The auction format is experiencing a renaissance of sorts on eBay. For several years, eBay has been depreciating the auction style format in favor of the fixed-price format (Buy It Now and Stores inventory) through various incentives such as listing fee discounts, extended durations, and favorable treatment under the Best Match. Recently, however, this trend has started to turn around. Auctions are making a comeback.
eBay seemed to signal the auction formats return to favor when they offered sellers the opportunity to post five free auction style listings each month. Then, eBay recently redistributed the ratio of auction to fixed-priced listings they display on the first page of the Best Match search results. According to the Best Match Webinar eBay held last week, auctions now comprise an average of 70% of the listings on the first page of the search results. In fact, eBay is going as far as testing a notice on the Sell Your Item form encouraging sellers of a single item to employ the auction format to achieve increased visibility in the Best Match search results.
Also, the most recent Best Match changes level the playing field somewhat among auction listings. There is no boost in Best Match for free shipping (although listings with excessive shipping and handling charges will be penalized) and Top-rated sellers do not get increased visibility for their auction-format listings (they receive a boost in Best Match for fixed-price listings only). In fact, auctions are currently the easiest way to get visibility in Best Match without all the hassle of Best Match optimization.
So all hail the return of the auction format!
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Its becoming pay to play again on eBay. Maybe their metrics is telling them listing fee revenue have dropped and promoting auctions again as the way to bump profit from listing fees.