Caroline Malifaud of dot com’s Advertising team has announced that some of the much hated on-site banner advertising space will be available to sellers, in the form of keyword banner advertising.

The new ads will be on a Pay-per-Click basis with sellers bidding on the keywords they wish to trigger the display of their ads, and the ads themselves have options for title, message, and optional picture – in this respect it operates similar to Google’s Adwords program.  eBay call theirs “AdCommerce”.

The bad news is that seller’s ads will be competing with Shopping.com and Yahoo Ads, therefore there will be budget-constrained effectiveness.  Although the announcement says sellers cannot use AdCommerce to advertise pages off-eBay, that is exactly what every Shopping.com and many of the Yahoo adverts will be doing.

It is to be hoped, as the program gains traction, that the external linkers will be dropped from participating, otherwise eBay’s buyer and seller exodus will continue.  That should also then drop the keyword values back to prices affordable to the majority of eBay sellers, rather than just those with big budgets.  Although, once the likes of Buy.com, Blue Star, and General Motors begin wading in with heavy bids, no traditional eBay seller (PowerSeller or not) will be able to compete with them.

I am hoping eBay are smart enough to recognise the need for a selling history and quality performance for participating in AdCommerce, otherwise any large corporate could register for a seller account, run a few listings for appearance’s sake, but basically be on their as an adjunct to primary marketing activities.  It might also tempt some of the VeRO-zealous designer names onto the site … and then we can all trash their DSRs for selling fakes showing them just how tough it is to be a professional eBay seller.

Positioning of the ads will be at the bottom of browse and search results lists, though it’s not stated if that will be before or after the crucial links to further results pages, to international sellers’ items, and to eBay Stores’ results.  Based on tests blogged about on various sites this year, the ads are likely to appear before those, disgruntling affected sellers.

eBay will be Beta testing the program to selected users over the next two months with full launch on the US and German sites due just before Christmas.  It was not stated if non-residents of those countries will be able to participate for ad-space on the two sites – I’m hoping they can.  It was also not stated if the program would roll to other sites – let’s hope it does.

Ed