eBay to Phase Out 3rd Party Checkout
eBay annouced that it is to phase out 3rd party checkout.
This is a move that will impact many thousands of (usually large) eBay sellers.
It will affect us, as we use ChannelAdvisor, as do many larger sellers. ChannelAdvisor’s main markets are US and UK, and they have some very big eBay sellers using their systems.
For us, ChannelAdvisor offers the ability to:
- manage inventory and SKUS
- manage listings/ads templates
- automatically schedule and maintain ads in eBay (and soon, Trading Post)
- capture customers
- upsell on checkout
- sell into other channels like Shopping.com, Getprice
- have an online store
I was thinking about how the eBay decision to remove 3rd party checkout would affect us.
We don’t get too many upsells in checkout (where a customer can add another item to their sale on the way through payment) so there will be little impact there.
One thing it will stop is the ability to capture customers from eBay. We offer newsletter signup on the way through checkout (which can be incentivised if you like), and also promote the ability to visit our online store to buy from a wider range of items. eBay customers are not easy to convert. They tend to like shopping on eBay, and buying at auction.
Both of these things, although not contributing greatly immediately, offer some long term benefit as you grow a customer base. And you can pick up eBay customers in your mailing list and get them to buy direct. Many sellers do it, and if you aren’t you should be.
All this decision does is provide us even more incentive to grow our business outside of eBay, in more cost effective sales channels. We have received some sales from Tradingpost.com.au auctions already, and although the turnover is slow there at the moment the cost of sale is very appealing.
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Comments
Yes,
This decision will impact a lot of sellers. To counter this, I would love to see some better tools to market to eBay mailing lists. Their current amil system is a little clunky.
And they are cracking down on things in Australia like phone numbers and email addresses in listings shortly too apparently.
Just quietly, we get a nice number of visitors from people seeing our customer service email address, and typing our URL straight into the browser URL bar from product pages. And we get some good sales from this.
Spread your wings!
I believe they are now planning to anonymize pre-sale ASQs(remove e-mail addresses) as part of their drive to keep buyers on the site.
Removing 3rd party checkout (aka checkout redirect) is a big deal.
I can understand that the buyer experience is confusing, but it removes opportunities to upsell and acquire your own customers, as you point out.
I think the recent announcements from eBay (this one, PayPal only or mandatory, listing description restrictions) show a trend of putting up walls around their business - trying to stop any possible leakage of fees.