Now all of eBay’s “Buy it Now” offers will be eligible for cashback rewards. With eBay’s expansive catalog of products, from jewelry to electronics, you’ll start to see more cashback ads appearing in our search results. That means more ways for you to save.
You’ll see three primary differences between this user experience and other cashback user experiences:
- There’s an eBay ad with a cashback gleam (the cashback icon in the image here).
- Instead of going into the Live Search cashback experience, you now go directly to the advertiser’s website, which in this case is eBay.
- The cashback gleam follows you throughout your eBay shopping experience. This is good continuity for the consumer and something we want to do more of, but it takes a bit of work on the advertiser side to enable this.
We want to learn from two experiences in the cashback program. Depending on customer and advertiser feedback, we’ll make the necessary changes to deliver the best user experience over time.
Destination site experience This is the experience that went live last month. Consumers research a product category on Live Search and then click a Live Search cashback ad to head over to cashback for the best deal. We’ve had a lot of feedback that we should do a better job integrating our product research capabilities with our cashback experience. So we’ll work hard to do that over the next few releases.
Direct-to-merchant experience The other experience we envisioned for cashback would integrate directly with advertisers from the search results page. In this experience, advertiser’s ads will appear with a cashback gleam. When shoppers click the gleam in the ad, they head directly to the advertiser’s site. Obviously, this streamlines a bit of the purchasing process but requires some custom development on the partner website to enable it. We took this approach with eBay and are exploring it with other advertisers as well.
We’re excited to offer consumers more money-saving cashback rewards with eBay and look forward to hearing from you on how best to implement new features and functionality to the cashback experience.
Paul Dillon, Director, Commercial Search