They're Ba-aack!

In accordance with Standard eBay Operating Procedure, on Friday 26th September 2008 at precisely 4.36 pm, on their way out the door, eBay Australia made a quiet announcement regarding the 'trial placement' of advertisements on eBay.com.au.

26 September 2008 | 04:36PM EST


Earlier this week eBay commenced a trial placement of advertisements on the View Item Pages on eBay.com.au. Similar advertisements are already running in a number of markets, including Austria, Switzerland, France, Italy, and the UK.

The Australian version of these advertisements went live at approximately 7pm on Monday 22 September and created some discussion among the Community until they were withdrawn the next morning. We apologise for introducing these new placements without letting you know first. We also appreciate the feedback provided and have taken onboard some of the concerns expressed by the Community.

This trial will continue, however the advertisements will be placed lower on the View Item Page and will be clearly marked as a sponsored link. During this trial advertisements will only appear in approximately 10-15% of View Item Pages in the following categories only:

* sport
* movies
* electronics

Regards,
The eBay team



As you can see the new and improved advertisement placement is above the description.

A quote from a seller on the eBay Australia discussion boards

I've found that clever Google ads at the bottom of search results were actually quoting prices. I recently bought some photography gear that way, all the advertiser did was say eg: "1.6m tripod $20.00 incl shipping". That was targetted right to my search terms, and the price was lower than ANY of the BINs on Ebay.

So I clicked it and bought the items off ebay - 3 in fact. The seller was the online shop of a very large Ebay PS, the items and even the photos were identical. And the P&H was heaps cheaper buying direct, too. Now that I know the name of the online shop, I search on ebay but check prices direct with that company too.

Ebay is crazy to allow this - I mean, the companies advertising are ebay sellers, so all that ebay is doing is PROMOTING off-ebay sales. Considering that they won't allow sellers to do this - how totally dumb is that?

Y'all come back!