eBay Offers 5000 Free Listings - Promotion Sucks and is Awesome

eBay announced yesterday that they were gifting qualified sellers 5000 free listings in addition to their normal 50 free per month. The promotion runs from December 6-8 and has some restrictions, so read the fine print.

The announcements like this are usually looked at in one of two ways, 1) Woopee! Awesome!...or... 2) Mother%&$#er!

These promotions give sellers an opportunity to run high priced items through auction  to take a chance that someone might bite, but without having to pay fees. They also flood the eBay site with so much crap that it ends up making the sell-through rate go down.

But hey, it's good for eBay. It puffs up eBay's year end traffic by adding millions of pages to their site, a time of the year when sellers are already getting increased sales due to holiday traffic and a time of year that eBay is strongly competing against sites like Amazon for traffic. Don't forget, every listing you add to eBay means more ad revenue that eBay will earn.

Whether you like getting 5000 free listings or not, there is one group of people that absolutely hate the promotion, those are the sellers that just paid full price to have their listings on eBay for 7 days. The promo's 1, 3, 5 day auctions will be all mixed in with the 7 day auctions from the past few days, thereby diluting those listings...Merry Christmas!