AuctionBytes is doing the third installment of its biannual survey of eBay sellers. If you sell on eBay, please take a few minutes to complete the survey.

http://tinyurl.com/yqkjyr

eBay's new ads are here. This year, TV ads will feature a "Shop Victoriously" theme, and eBay will spreading the "it's better when you win it" message in online ads on sites such as Yahoo, MSN, AOL, MySpace and Facebook. You can read eBay marketing head Gary Briggs' post on the Announcement board, which includes a video of one of the television commercials (http://www2.ebay.com/aw/core/200709141531372.html).

Speaking of advertisements, have you noticed ads on the bottom of eBay search results that send shoppers to other, non-eBay websites? I wrote about it in a news article, "eBay Sends Shoppers Off Its Site with Yahoo Ads" (http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y07/m09/i05/s01).

You might wonder why eBay would serve ads that compete with its own listings. eBay said it's to improve the buyer experience. ChannelAdvisor CEO Scot Wingo has an interesting theory.

Wingo believes that eBay may be dynamically calculating the CPC (cost-per-click) revenue from the Yahoo Sponsored Links ads versus the Final Value Fee (FVF) commission it charges to its own sellers when an item is sold. "This makes economic sense for eBay, but for those sellers who paid a listing fee..., they are now being negatively economically impacted," Wingo said. "eBay is now on a slippery slope where they are in many cases economically driven to NOT drive traffic to listings that sellers have paid for."

When asked whether eBay was dynamically comparing FVFs to CPCs, eBay spokesperson Hani Durzy said, "We're not willing to sacrifice FVF for cost per click. Ultimately what we're trying to do is create a good buying experience."

(Of course, sellers might say eBay should extend that logic and let sellers include their website URLs in their listings for shoppers who might want a different style/color/size item than the item they're currently browsing.)

Durzy also said he was puzzled by the idea that eBay could somehow dynamically measure how much the company could get for FVF for active auction listings where the final price has yet to be determined.

When I pointed out that eBay could conceivably attach a value to a keyword based on what eBay knows about the item's average selling price and sell-through rate, Durzy said, "Is it conceivable that it could be done? Yes, but it's not what we're doing. As I said, we're not interested in trading Final Value Fees for click-through revenue."

"We understand how it can seem counter-intuitive to some sellers that this could be a good thing, but we would ask sellers to also understand that if they're not successful on the eBay marketplace, we're not successful on the eBay marketplace," Durzy said. He also said eBay is still testing the ads.

eBay feels that a good buying experience is paramount. If a shopper comes to the site, they should be able to easily find what they're looking for. Evidently, to management, that includes finding the item "off eBay" as well. But what eBay management should be asking themselves is, "Why isn't this item ON eBay?"

Could it be because eBay is not as profitable a channel for sellers as it was in the past? And over the long haul, does it really make sense to send buyers away from the site in exchange for CPC revenue? If sellers reach a critical level of frustration caused by competing Yahoo ads pointing to off-site listings, they might list even less on eBay, find a more profitable channel to place their merchandise, and purchase those same Yahoo Keywords, driving even more buyers off the eBay site. Listing less on eBay means less selection on the site, and more buyers who search and subsequently exit eBay by clicking on Yahoo Ads. In essence, eBay could be pushing supply and demand on eBay into a downward spiral.

You can leave your own comments about Yahoo ads on eBay on the AuctionBytes blog (http://tinyurl.com/2uvbhj).

Philipp Justus said on August 13th, "we need to do a better job communicating with sellers," referring to eBay's communication regarding its Seller Non-Performance initiative. But the way eBay has been handling glitches in the weeks following that pronouncement shows it has not come close to achieving its goal of improved communications.

eBay sent a message to many sellers on September 5 telling them to immediately submit a one-time payment for monthly fees because their automatic payment method had been declined. eBay never sent a follow-up message to sellers to tell them it was an error and not to submit the duplicate payment. At a time when eBay is pressuring sellers to improve their communications with buyers, eBay needs to heed its own advice.

In dealing with communications regarding a subsequent glitch at PayPal, the companies (eBay and PayPal) chose to report the problem on their respective blogs rather than post on eBay's Systems Announcement Board.

And eBay has also failed to tell sellers that Completed Item search is broken and has been for at least 3 weeks (http://tinyurl.com/2b3m6z).

The bottom line is that buyers and sellers need to monitor many sources to get critical news about eBay: the eBay Systems Announcement board and the eBay General Announcement board; the eBay blog and the PayPal blog; eBay and industry discussion boards; and the AuctionBytes Newsflash newsletter and the AuctionBytes blog.

Thanks for reading.