eBay takes a step backwards - quietly expanding the adcommerce system to off-eBay advertisers

By: President and CEO of ChannelAdvisor, Scot Wingo

.........It looks like eBay is now looking to expand their AdCommerce program to allow 'off eBay' ads via shopping.com into AdCommerce.The way I imagine this would work:

1. Retailer specifies which of their shopping.com products they want to advertise
2. Retailer specifies a CPC for the program or maybe even at the product level
3. eBay shows off-eBay ads on search result pages.

As stated in the title, I think this is a big step BACKWARDS for eBay.  We were excited to see them announce they were taking the banner page off of SERPs and some of the irrelevency caused by the featured program.  But here we are a short time later seeing them seemingly talking out of both sides of their mouth and not only increasing a program that decreases the relevancy of the search results, but now will also include taking buyers off eBay!

eBay needs to do some soul searching and decide what they want to be when they grow up - transactional or advertising (cpc/cpm) based?  Do they want to truly show the most relevent products or do they want to focus on the pure short-term economics?

Stay tuned

We'll be on the lookout for more information about this program, specifically:

1. Is there closed-loop tracking available?
2. What is the ROI?  
3. Is this actually a cheaper way to sell on eBay than selling direct?   

 program to allow 'off eBay' ads via shopping.com into AdCommerce....