eBay begins favouring in-house advertising, in move similar to Amazon

eBay has announced that it will remove prominent third-party advertising in favour of its own promoted listings – a move similar to what Amazon does in promoting its own products.

The removal of third party product listing ads will come into effect on 1 May 2017 as eBay takes ‘strides to provide sellers more opportunity to get added visibility and velocity for their items and to reduce competition from external ad sources’. eBay says it will continue to display third-party text-based ads and graphical banner ads.

“eBay always knew that we had massive scale, but [advertising] wasn’t our core focus,” Bridget Davies, VP and general manager for eBay advertising North America, told Recode. “But it’s actually not an adjacent business; it’s a tool kit for brands and requires investing into it.”

In addition to the removal of third-party ads, eBay says it will display the ‘best Promotions Manager special offers from sellers’ in the search results on its mobile app.

eBay made $313m in consolidated revenue – of a total $519m generated in marketing services and other revenues – on its marketplace in the fourth quarter of 2016, down $13m on the year prior.