The eBay Commerce Network originally started out as Dealtime.com, which eBay acquired in 2005 for $620 million. eBay then rebranded Dealtime as Shopping.com, which really was the beginning of the eBay Commerce Network (ECN) in 2013.
Today, the eBay Commerce Network spans multiple websites beyond just Shopping.com, including eBay.com, CNET, Consumer Reports. In fact, Shopping.com accounts for less than 5% of the total eBay Commerce Network traffic.
The largest source of traffic from the eBay Commerce Network is eBay.com, and the ads (shown above) look very similar to Google Shopping PLAs. They are triggered on the bottom of eBay.com search results pages with the heading Sponsored Links, and are called eBay Product Ads.
eBay Commerce Network is an excellent channel (or really group of CSE channels) to try to drive more sales to your website.
Do you need help with eBay Commerce Network Feed Management?
Preparing an Export
There is an eBay Commerce Network template on the Feedonomics Exports page, however the eBay Commerce Network accepts a mostly Google-formatted feed, so you may choose to set up a copy of your Google export for your eBay Commerce Network. The one difference is in the way that ECN prefers the ‘price’ attribute to be set up (see attribute notes below). Below are the required and recommended Google attributes for an eBay Commerce Network feed.
Required Attributes
- id
- title
- link
- image_link
- price*
- availability
- condition
*The ‘price’ column should contain the price that the shopper will pay. If you have multiple price values in your feed like [price] and [sale_price], you will need to write a transformer to ensure that the correct price value is in the ‘price’ column. See note on ‘Original Price’ below.
Recommended Attributes, In Order of Impact
- gtin
- mpn
- description
- mobile_link
- SKU Bid (eBay Commerce Network attribute, see Documentation)
- product_type
- brand
- Original Price (eBay Commerce Network attribute)**
- shipping(price)
- color
- gender
- size
- material
- age_group
- item_group_id
**If your feed has separate [price] and [sale_price] columns, you can put the [sale_price] value into the ‘price’ column on your export and the [price] value into the ‘Original Price’ column.
Other Columns
Other columns may be present in your eBay Commerce Network feed, but they will simply be ignored.
Note on HTML
Unlike the eBay marketplace, eBay Commerce Network will not accept HTML formatting in titles or descriptions.
Setting Up Your Export in the eBay Commerce Network
eBay Commerce Network accepts feeds uploaded to the ebayadvertising.com FTP server. Login to the client’s eBay Commerce Network Merchant Center account to complete this part of the setup.
Brian Roizen is the Cofounder and Chief Architect of Feedonomics, a full-service feed optimization platform that optimizes product data for hundreds of channels. He has been featured on numerous podcasts and eCommerce webinars, and regularly contributes to Search Engine Land and other industry-leading blogs. Brian graduated summa cum laude from UCLA with both a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering.
