eBay announces price-matching service to boost online appeal

Friday, June 23, 2017 - 09:05 by Mike Price

Auction site eBay will give customers the opportunity to get the best deals when buying particular items via shopping online thanks to a freshly introduced price-matching feature.

The Daily Mail reports that its ‘Price Match Guarantee’ will be applicable to over 50,000 products and will enable it to compete directly with major rivals, including Amazon.

The price matching will not be carried out at the checkout, as instead customers will receive a voucher to cover the difference in price if a particular product is available cheaper elsewhere.

The explicit motivation behind this move is a need to boost visitor number and sales, since eBay has struggled to keep up with the strong growth enjoyed by dominant competitors. It is also seeking to make its marketplace stand out from other e-commerce services by focusing on the ability to find unique listings rather than mass-produced, generic products.

Another upcoming change which eBay has been touting in recent weeks is a promise to provide three day delivery on all items it sells, making sure that the third party sellers that use its service are all onboard with the improvements being made.

Furthermore, there is an undoubted shift in eBay’s strategy which sees its bid-based structure for pricing replaced with a more traditional approach to shopping online in which prices remain static.

The value of being able to compare prices and get the best deals by switching to different retailers is well known to consumers. So by introducing a price matching scheme, eBay will hopefully be able to stop its customers heading elsewhere if they find a better deal.

Real time price matching has already arrived in many UK supermarkets and so there is now an expectation that this type of money-saving feature will appear more regularly in the digital sphere.