is there a problem with checkout? NEW feature : " 4 people have this in their basket"

[best-range]

Today when I open any of my listings I get this new ebay feature, a red banner saying how many people "have this item in their basket".

Is there a problem with ebay's checkout or their payment processor ?

Any ideas what that "improvement" is there for ? apart from justifying paying wages to the person who created it , but what's the benefit to the seller ?  do buyers see it too?

It's not clickable, so not possible to send an invoice to the buyer in case there is a problem with the checkout .

I'd rather not know this as now I started to worry there must be some problem with the checkout or payment & customers are not able to buy/pay for their items, as almost every listing now has this red banner across.

Anyone else noticed this? any ideas what purpose does it serve ?

[bittyboy101]

I've noticed this too over the last few weeks...

I recon it's eBay's new trick to solve the no sales problem and get more people to buy quickly when they see other people have also added the same item you are about to buy to their baskets !

It also comes up with the same red banner "3 watched in the last 24 hours"

It's all psychology to get people to act straight away and BUY !

[james_cumbria]

I tried raising this with eBay today, but their representative was hopeless.  My own concern is that for the last 3 months or so I have been experiencing quite a significant drop in sales while at the same time starting to see these messages about buyers having unpaid items in their basket.  Like the original poster, I was wondering if there might be some issue with checking out so yesterday I tried buying one of my own items listed on my eBay business account from my private account only to have my payment method (nothing unusual, I bank with LLoyds) declined.   Maybe its just a coincidence.  Anyway eBay's New Delhi team are unable to shed any light on it.     

[jonat_broad]

I honestly find some of the replies amazing to what is just a fairly common widget on most e-commerce websites!

peope add things to basket. For whatever reason they don't check out.

its simply a mechanism to encourage a purchase by suggesting the potential it might sell out. Etsy, not on the high street loads of sites have this.

i find it wild there might be a belief there is some conspiracy behind it!