Is a seller allowed to do this? Advice please.

ceanothus

#31 No, not at all.

The sponsored links that appear at the bottom of Ebay listings are placed there by Google. Ebay get paid clickthrough revenue for those links. My links sometimes appear because I pay for Google Adwords. Adwords can be placed on Google itself or on any affiliated shopping site that shows Google Adwords. That's a separate and additional cost to the fees I pay Ebay for product listings, and is an arrangment between Google and Ebay. If any sellers would like to promote their sites in this way they can also start a Google Adwords campaign and pay per click.

For what it's worth, I disagree with Ebay's decision to have 'sponsored links' at the bottom of search results. I thought then, and I still think now, that it shortchanges sellers who are paying Ebay a decent fee to bring traffic to the site. However that's not my decision, and I'm not about to suspend my Adwords campaign on a point of principle.

What I don't do is to use the Ebay listing to direct traffic offsite, and I object if others do. I don't think that makes me a busybody, just a 'business body'.

Hope that's not 'inconsistent'

Marty_J

Well, fair enough. It's eBay who are inconsistent then.

They come off with all this BS about why you can't link off-site, yet they don't mind it happening as long as they still get their cut.

So eBay themselves are just as bad as those nefarious sellers who link off-site. The only difference being that eBay try and pretend it's all for your own good, and then try and hold sellers to some higher standard than they themselves follow.

ceanothus

There was an outcry from sellers when sponsored links were introduced, rightly so. Ebay claimed sponsored links would only appear when the search returned no matches, i.e. buyer is looking for something that isn't listed on the site.

The theory was that sponsored links appear in that instance so that Ebay can a) take at least some (reduced) revenue from the buyer's visit and b) act as a wider 'shopping mall' so that buyers are encouraged to visit Ebay again next time they are shopping.

Great theory, however I've seen my web link appear when I have exactly the same stuff listed on BIN and returned in the search results immediately above! Sponsored links are just another revenue stream for Ebay, although they are nowhere near as lucrative as a listing fee + FVF + PayPal fee.

In my humble opinion this could be part of a wider commercial deal with Google, Ebay may have been put under pressure to allow Google ads in return for preferential search placement. That's just my guess, otherwise at face value it's a pretty insane thing to have done.