eBay to end controversial practice of "extending" auctions?

Some very observant sellers noticed this subtle change to the eBay "fee circumvention" policy section that seems to spell the end of Extenders (more on this later)->

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.

Comments

[Al]

Removal of Revise Item Duration

this is some serious bullshit, little flexibility that the sellers have dancing around high fees,etc is being taken away..

any way to petition this for a reversal ????

[Bill Bogardus]

Apparently, the ebay police has forgotten about the extenders now and moved on to ruining the feedback situation on the site. Many of the original users are back to extending all of their auctions now. Ebay never took steps to change the software to prevent the extenders from working. Sure, they Barked and Growled...then put the tail down and run off...

This tool always worked and the process was always around. If you were a small seller, this was easy to do by hand and still is. Downside is it is very time consuming.

Bill Bogardus

biggbill

[Tony P.]

Scott wrote: "no official announcement, so is this coming soon or for real now?"

It's doubtful that you will see an official announcement - ebay doesn't want such a marketing gimmick to be publicized. If it did, and sellers started doing it, en mass, ebay would have to cancel all those listings AND refund the fees. That would be a WHALE of a hit to their revenue.

The funny thing is, ebay has allowed such a practice, all along. It isn't like you can revise a listing to include GooglePayment - and then ebay SLAMS you because you broke the rules.

Why the heck is the ability to revise the auction duration even available, if not to be used? Who knows? I'm off to check if revising will allow for Google Payments!

[Randy Smythe]

Eventually if you find a way to game the system eBay will make changes to prevent it. When I started selling S&H was reasonable. We charged $3.95 flat per order (even if you had 100 items in your order) now sellers use high S&H to avoid FVF fees and place themselves higher up on the stores list. So now eBay has made efforts to correct this.

In the case of the extender we used Ethical's tool and were pleased with the results. I thought it was a great idea but only worked if a limited number of sellers used it. Apparently eBay doesn't want that to happen. How will sellers game the system now?