eBay hired a longtime Amazon executive to run its ad program, an area that the CEO sees as crucial to growing company revenue. Elisabeth Rommel is eBay’s General Manager for eBay Ads North America where she leads seller and brand partnerships, operations, and marketing for the program.
In an interview published on the eBay Ads blog in June, she revealed she had been a longtime Amazon employee who also spent time at Google in order to help large online retailers:
“One of my career highlights was being part of the launch team for Amazon’s display advertising solutions in 2006, helping it grow into the giant business it is today.
“From there, I joined Google to work with large online retailers, introducing tools like product listing ads to help them grow their businesses.
“I boomeranged back to Amazon and spent the last 9 years leading product, tech, sales, account management, and marketing functions for Amazon’s Retail Technologies, Sponsored Products, Marketplace, and HR Technologies teams.”
She also described how she believes eBay is different from her previous employers:
“eBay is unique in the sense that we aren’t trying to be everything to everyone. We focus on what has always been the main mission for eBay: create a marketplace of happy customers allowing discovery of both new and used products in a trusted shopping environment.”
Rommel said she wants to “reimagine” the eBay Ads brand and help build a robust offering of products and solutions that she said other marketplaces simply don’t or can’t offer.
eBay Ads is an important program for the marketplace as it seeks to grow revenue beyond what it charges in seller fees. In the spring, eBay CEO Jamie Iannone said advertising was “only” 1% of GMV (sales) and said eBay was continuing to look at “monetization” as well as “adding value to sellers.”
eBay just announced its cost-per-click ad program called Promoted Listings Advanced, which give sellers priority access to the top of eBay search results pages – read more about it in this EcommerceBytes news article.
In the June interview, Rommel said she was focused on getting the eBay Ads story out to brands and entrepreneurs alike about how it could help them scale their business. “As we’re releasing new features and new products, I want to establish a community of sellers interested in experimentation, listen to their voices, and watch their businesses grow,” she said.
You can read the full interview with Elisabeth Rommel from June on the eBay Ads blog.
Useless since most smaller sellers arent interested in paying for those ads/clicks.
Look at all the “super smart eBay genius’s” on Youtube. %99 are buying Walmart returns or getting goods a thrift store/garage sale. Does anyone think THEY will pay (when they may only have 1 of an item) to run ads?
Most of these people are sourcing goods form makers – since those makers DONT want their goods on eBay to begin with!
That leaves only the few big players – which is contrary to this womans statement(s).
It would be much easier to just “be good” to your sellers – its free, its easy, and it creates the good will thats needed to fix eBays issues.
Anyone know the exact date eBay is starting this. I need to remove what’s left of my items on ebay. I will stick with ecrater from now on. My sales have been better then eBay of late.
Ebay has not announced any start date as of yet as they are still designing the program from what I remember reading. As usual I am sure they will not waste any time doing Beta Testing as Ebay figured out long ago that using Sellers to debug their programs is much cheaper than having to pay for a department to do so. Also from what I have read this will be a voluntary program just as Promoted Listings is, although I am sure they will get higher priority in the Search Engine results. Of course this is all dependent on Ebays ability to figure out how to make that part of the Search Engine functional due to all of the previous changes to exclude Sellers items that did not comply with Ebays latest wishes gimmick to increase sales.