eBay testing Yahoo! partnership

Today it appears that sponsored listings from Overture/Yahoo! started showing up in certain ebay results that return zero results.  Here are two examples I found today (note that the links worked for me, but eBay/Yahoo! maybe A/B testing so if you don't see them I've included screenshots (click on the thumbnail - I've circled the Yahoo! Search Marketing  piece in there).

1. The first example is in the main search engine when you have zero results: "coach handbag sweater".

This is admittedly a random term, but shows how the algorithm is working.  While the eBay results come back with zero, the Yahoo results are doing matching that finds "coach handbag".

(This raises the question, why isn't eBay matching on that term to coach handbag, but that's a question for another day).

2. The next example is when you search within a seller's listings (a setting in the main search engine).  I'll pick on rockbottomgolf here with the nonsensical term: "taylor made r100" 

Again you see the broad matching at work with the taylor made ads coming up from YSM.

I'm sure this is the first turn of the crank, but it's interesting to see the partnership start to bear some fruit.  If eBay has enough searches that return zero results and the revenue-per-click (and rev share) are significant, this could have some revenue upside for eBay.  I haven't had a chance to see what sellers think yet - sellers that are out there, what do you think - feel free to post to comments.

Comments

[Brad Young]

If you have access to a powerseller account the reaction is Very Negative:

http://forums.ebay.com/db1/thread.jspa?threadID=1000320414&tstart=0&mod=1153292567399

[Amy]

It sounds like a desparate move to try to bring in some revenue, I think their shareholders are starting to complain (I dumped my ebay stock right after their skype purchase). I dont think it will affect sellers that much, but this strategy probably isnt going to result in anything for ebay either. Ebay couldnt even really get their keyword selling on their own website to work. I think they finally gave up and would sell ad banners out to just about anyone. I remember seeing really odd ad banners on top of searchs that had no correlation to the ad being shown.

Im not sure if this was recent, but I looked through yahoo shopping recently and it looks like ebay is feeding store only items directly into yahoo shopping. In some categories, they are dominating everyone else just by sheer size. I dont think they were doing that a couple of months ago. I know my yahoo shopping pay per click went down a bit, we probably had 20% less clicks and we have twice as many items being fed into yahoo's system. Its probably part of their hard push to get ebay express going this fall. But I have a gut feeling that if ebay express goes down the drain, ebay will really need to be bought out by someone who can take the company further.

By the way, we're a channeladvisor customer also :)