This week, according to an announcement by Jeff King, eBay’s Senior Director of Finding, eBay will remove the restriction of sellers having no more than 10 listings returned on search and browse results pages.

According to interviews reported on AuctionBytes, this is due to the new FP30 recent sales weighting in Best Match achieving the desired result of encouraging sellers to place all inventory into a single Fixed Price listing.

King’s brief announcement explains that -

Since July of last year, we’ve been showing a maximum of 10 listings per page, whether Fixed Price or Auction-style, from any one seller. Now that a track record of recent sales is a key factor in the sort order for Fixed Price, most sellers are consolidating their listings into fewer low-cost multi-quantity listings. This has proven to be the right strategy for sellers and a great shopping experience for buyers.

This strategy, of course, only works for sellers with volume of a given product.  For single item inventories, Auction Format is the recommended path by eBay staffers due to the time ending soonest visibility boost.

In their drive to get as much as possible into core, eBay staff appear to have forgotten that for run-of-the-mill inventory, and for low-demand-but-will-sell-eventually inventory, Shops Format (SIF) listings remain the best value (in those countries where it remains available) and still offers the lowest cost-risk for sellers on the major western-country sites.  A “quick and dirty” poll by Skype this morning, of local SE Asian sellers listing on USA, shows that they are still driving 55% to 75% of their sales volume via the SIF format – there’s still life in the old horse yet for those who know how to market store inventory.

As far as I’m aware, eBay are retaining the enforced mix of Auction and Fixed Price listings per page, which will make it difficult for any one seller to swamp the first page in its entirety.  The UK appears not to be withdrawing its “one BIN in a maximum of 15 listings” policy for identical products – no announcement has yet been issued by them on this policy reversal by the USA site.

Ed