eBay to end controversial practice of "extending" auctions?
Extension of Auctions - eBay listings ('auctions') have a fixed duration. eBay may on rare occasions (for example, as the result of a site outage) extend the duration of an auction. Extension of auction duration by a seller, via either manual actions or the use of automated tools, is not permitted. Extension of auctions by a seller for any reason is not only a form of fee avoidance, but also harms the finding experience for buyers.
Here's a quick background and tutorial on Extenders if this topic is new to you. A now-defunct company, Ethical worked with a large seller to productize an idea he had found to be a winning strategy for improving sell-through rates.
eBay has a way you can manually "extend" an auction if it hasn't had bids and it is less than 12hrs from close, so what Ethical did was automate this. The way it works is you set your auctions (could be fixed price or BIN too) for 1 day. Then at close to 12hrs to the listing's original duration ending (11hrs into a 24hr listing), the software checks the listing and if there are no bids asks eBay to change the duration to 3 days. Then again, this process happens all the way to 7 or 10 days (if the seller is willing to pay the additional 10 day fee).
Why does this help sell-through? Well, the eBay indexing system doesn't really prioritize revised items (its busy handling the millions of fresh new listings every day - correctly so) and thus when you employ the strategy of extension listed above, your item shows up in eBay's search engine (which remember is listed by default as 'ending first") up to 5 times (1/3/5/7/10).
Once Ethical went under, a plethora of these tools hit the market at near-free prices. Nobody but eBay knows how widespread the practice is, but if you were to survey 100 top sellers in each category, I think you would find 15-30 of them utilizing Extenders.
If you want to know what an extended listing looks like, there's typically the word "revised" in parens next to the description as a link. When you click it, you can see that one of the revisions is "listing duration". Here's an example.
eBay's documentation lists extenders now under fee circumvention (I'm guessing the argument is that you receive the same exposure from one listing that others pay for with 4-5) and search manipulation.
This is just starting to ripple through the community and as you would predict, sellers that utilize extenders are a) confused (no official announcement, so is this coming soon or for real now? b) upset that the benefit of Extenders is going away.
Conversely sellers that haven't known about the Extenders are intrigued by the concept and sometimes upset they weren't in the loop.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out over the coming weeks.
1 comment:
This is with regard to ebay strategies that Ebay has put an end to controversial practice of extending auctions. This is true to some extent. In my view ebay auctions have fixed duration. Further, extension of auctions by a seller for any reason is not only a form of fee avoidance, but also harms the finding experience for buyers.
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