The eBay Partner Network have announced the launch of “Custom Banner”, a new tool that gives affiliate marketers a new way to incorporate live eBay listings directly onto their sites.

Custom Banner is stated as being a customizable flash banner that displays real-time eBay listings based on publishers’ search criteria.  If you’re familiar with ePN’s existing creatives and widgets … think of Custom Banner as an enhancement to regular flash and static banner ads that don’t show specific, live eBay listings.  It also has several new features that give it an enhanced look and feel and, in some ways, more flexibility than Editor Kit.

Custom banner allows you to choose from several pre-defined themes, or design your own, then filter the search results based on keyword, category, and more.  It’s branded with the “Right Now on eBay” logo and PayPal logos for listings that offer PayPal as a payment method.  I’m not sure how much click-collateral those are worth outside of the existing eBay and PayPal user base during the user-discontent this year, but they could be attractive buzzwords for non-users.

Benefits (as stated by ePN) =

• Provides more flexibility than banner ads and Editor Kit – you can choose a standard banner ad size or specify the exact height and width you want
• Simple to set up right from the eBay Partner Network interface
• Enhanced look and feel – scrolling, Flash display, PayPal logo, and the ability to customize the color scheme
• Extended search options – you can get listings based on keyword, category, price range, seller, and listing type

To use Custom Banner -

• Go to the Tools tab in your ePN account and click on Widgets, then click on Custom Banner
• Choose your ad size (standard or custom)
• Select a pre-made theme or create your own
• Enter your tracking information
• Pick your search criteria
• Copy and paste the code from the wizard to your site

OK, let’s give it a go – I’m going to try and set one up in this post for one of our BuildaSkill Author’s eBay listings … here goes -

My findings -

• During step 1 above, the widget link states it’s still in Beta, and unlike the other tools does not offer a country list drop down.  It does however, offer the country program list within the widget creation page = confusing, but not a tool killer = neutral point
• I chose a custom size of 600w x 200h and tweaked only one colour (the scroll arrows) to blend the appearance with the BuildaSkill theme.  I’m not sure if the tool pre-read the css colours of the last browser page open – I need to play with it more to see if its doing that – but if it did, then that’s a neutral point with reservations – I really don’t like sites and tools that mine into my open windows, or systems, and pull information without my approval, however innocuous the information.
• The initial widget creation page only offers filtering by keywords, or by eBay category ID.  Clicking on Advanced Options loads a Java applet to choose Seller ID, listing type priority (“Worst” Match, ending first etc.) and like the WordPress flash uploader for images – it took an age to open (negative point if I’m busy).
  • It does not allow for searching for seller ID straight off the widget applet – you need to open a new window and go to an eBay site in your browser, to do that (it got really annoying waiting for the Captcha verification image each time I searched for a seller on eBay) = negative point.
• Then came a really annoying revelation – even if using advanced criteria to add a seller ID, you still have to input a search keyword – in other words, you need to browse the seller’s listings and find the relevant keyword to input before the widget creator will generate the code, as opposed to the widget just offering all of the seller’s inventory by default.
  • This means every time you use this widget, you’ll need to schedule a workload of going back and checking the display of every widget periodically, just in case the seller is no longer listing that product keyword, or has sold out of stock = major negative.
• However, once the above was done, the widget creator did update the preview with the actual items that would be displayed, which is a plus point.

Wonder of wonders too!  The Java script generated by the widget creator worked first time in WordPress without having to encapsulate it in a table or within “div” tags – unlike the eBaytogo widget code that gave me real problems last year = major plus point.

You can see the results of a fairly basic (quick and dirty) test above.  The widget creator gives some of the more popular standard banner sizes from a drop list, but not the crucial 468×60 or similar mainstream sizes.  This means you’re going to have to faff with custom sizes if you want to integrate the code into ad server tools like OpenX, which BuildaSkill are implementing site(s)-wide this quarter.  The flexibility and ease of use of the custom sizes is another major plus point, downgraded by the lack of common preset sizes to earn it only a regular plus point.

Overall = a cautious “I like it”, and I will no doubt find it useful over time … now if they could only create a context sensitive version of it, then it would be truly useful.

Ed