How to bankrupt your competition on eBay

[alpha-pods]

With the new promoted listings policy of charging everyone a promoted listing fee if anyone at all clicks on the advert the following scenario comes to mind.

if you click on all the adverts for your competitors it will cost them money.

what would eBay be able to do about this ?

are they even able to track it ?

would they police this kind of abuse anyway as its making them money ?

this policy change seems open to some pretty awful abuse.

eBay you suck !!!!

[papso22]

Similarly who is to say that ebay won't automatically click on new listings to 'check' them.  Would that count as a 'member click'?

[lucy_farmer]

Probably won't be long before somebody writes a bot program to do just that ! And sells it on ebay.......🙃

[jonatjonatjonat]

I assume you mean the PPC adverts. because the General Promotion ads are still a percentage of the sale.

The same applies on Google, and Amazon, and Facebook and - well to be fair, everywhere. PPC has been around for decades at this point - and yes, you are right - you as a user could spam click your competitors adverts for sure. But you'd imagine there would be more cases of this happening over the years right?

[superchallenge]

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@jonatjonatjonat wrote:

I assume you mean the PPC adverts. because the General Promotion ads are still a percentage of the sale.

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I would have suggested the OP is talking about the General Promoted Listings ads and not PPC, given the recent change of policy.

And while it might not send anyone bankrupt, it could still cause a little bit of a dent in the coffers if every single item sold incurs the promotional charge when some were getting through before without it.

[alpha-pods]

I was referring to the changes in the general promoted listings charges and i'm not actually suggesting you should try and bankrupt your competition using it. I'm pointing out that it is wide open to abuse and of course eBay would profit from that abuse.