No more email marketing for store subscribers?

By Ed | November 3rd, 2008 | Category: eBay BE | No Comments »

Tucked away at the bottom of an announcement from eBay Belgium appears to be a forewarning that Email Marketing is to be removed in the new year.

The announcement primarily addresses the introduction of anonymous emails – a system that eBay are rolling globally – but the last two sentences drop the bombshell for Store subscribers. It translates from French to English (via Google online translation) as -

Next year, e-mail ads will be removed in the same goal: we want to stop fraudsters offering to our buyers to conclude a transaction outside of eBay.

For now, we have decided not to introduce this change before Christmas.

For Shop users, this will be extremely unwelcome news if this is to roll globally, and will further compound beliefs that eBay 2009 is all about mega-sellers and the small vendors are no longer welcome on the site. It will also heavily dilute the value-for-money that eBay Shops/Stores provide.

You can view the original announcement (in French) here on the Belgian site, or the English translation by Google, here in our forums (forum login required). As always, we’d like to hear clarifications from bi-lingual native-French/ESL speakers (in English), to see if Google and ourselves understood this announcement correctly.