Derek Gehl reported from eBay live that eBay is no longer going to allow links to off eBay from any page, including About Me, blogs, review and Classifieds. In addition email addresses will no longer be made available to buyers or sellers. All email communication will I know people who have been asked to remove links from classifieds but when pressed for an alternative eBay took no further action. That was before the official announcement from eBay live though. This could have huge repercussions on any who uses eBay to build a business off of eBay. I have closed my store as my main use was to drive people to About Me and then into my own lists. I don't even think selling CD/DVD info products will be a productive marketing tactic any longer as you will only have direct off ebay access to purchasers only. Any thoughts on that?
interesting, they are REALLY fearful of people not needing them for ecommerce anymore. There are so many hosted shopping carts at this point that its not that hard to set up your own store, drive your own traffic and not NEED ebay anymore.
They are working really hard to become an insular marketplace. But consider this... If you sell on Amazon, you are in an insular marketplace. We sell on both eBay and Amazon - CDs and DVDs from public domain materials - and every product we send out has information about our website and it is quite common for an eBay or Amazon customer to become a website customer. It is also quite common for them to keep going back to our eBay or Amazon store for future purchases.
I think the way auction site are going is to allow very cheap listing, and allow other users to list their items and reference other off site items.