eBay and Snapchat join forces in social commerce

An unlikely alliance helps the world of social commerce to reach new heights. Global e-Commerce giant eBay and social media platform Snapchat have recently announced a mutually beneficial cooperation that allows eBay merchants to showcase their listings on Snapchat.

The process is simple and straightforward. eBay merchants have to choose the listing they want to share on Snapchat. Then, after clicking “share”, a Snapchat icon will appear. Selecting this icon will activate the camera feature of the app, allowing the merchant to create their Snapchat video. An eBay sticker with the image and link to the listing will automatically be added to the video.

This option works for both personal Snaps and Snap-stories. Users clicking on the sticker land on the eBay product page and can start shopping.

Screenshot of newsroom.snap.com illustrating the process

The embedded eBay sticker and the nature of Snapchat videos allows merchants to get creative and build compelling videos that fit the taste of their target market on Snapchat.

At first glance, Snapchat and eBay may not be the perfect partners for each other. After all, a rather large part of eBay customers (51.7%) are between the ages of 35 and 64 while the overwhelming majority (81.7%) of Snapchat users are below the age of 34.

However, what may seem as a mismatch at first could be a genius step for both platforms to broaden their audience and gain new customers from a completely new age group. eBay merchants opening up towards Snapchat grows the number of users on the social media platform, and at the same time it helps attract new shoppers to eBay. That’s a clear win-win for both.

But the biggest winner here is undoubtedly social commerce. As one of the major e-Commerce trends of 2023, social commerce is among the fastest growing segments of e-Commerce in the world.

According to a recent report, social commerce is currently worth around $492 billion worldwide and is projected to reach a staggering $1.2 trillion by 2025. These numbers show that social commerce is growing three times as fast as traditional e-Commerce.

No wonder that major players like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok all want a part of it. Recent cooperations between well-known platforms like Shopify and TikTok as well as Pinterest and WooCommerce show the industry’s faith in social commerce and predict big things to come.

YouTube, Snapchat and Facebook logos side by side

As it’s one of the most important global online marketplaces, we at globaleyez are no strangers to the world of eBay. In fact, this platform regularly pops up on our radar with an issue or another.

Back in 2021, eBay made the news (and our blog) when a German court ordered the marketplace to investigate potentially IP infringing listings upon receiving notice of their existence, ensure their removal, and even check for their reappearance. While this sounds great, as our follow-up piece sadly discovered, we can’t say that eBay now automatically discovers and removes reappearing IP-infringing listings on its own initiative, without any notification by us.

Luckily, the marketplace does recognize the importance of IP protection, as evidenced by their IP infringement policy and the setting up of sneaker authentication centres. This commitment is certainly commendable and a great starting point for the protection of our clients’ IP rights on eBay.

But what exactly do we do to prevent fraudsters from harming your brand on eBay and Snapchat?

Our marketplace monitoring service ensures the quick detection of potentially IP infringing listings on eBay (and over 150 other marketplaces). Should we need more information, a test purchase is perfect for gathering court-admissible proof on the origins of the product and the seller. Finally, should you choose to take the next steps, we can enforce your rights and ensure the quick removal of the offending listing from the platform.

And since we’ve discovered that eBay is particularly vulnerable to repeat offenders re-posting their infringing listings, a continuous monitoring service, combined with fast and effective takedowns is the best way to keep IP infringers from hurting your brand on the platform.

To gather data about sales volumes, revenue, best selling products and sellers, etc., we recommend a round or two of our marketplace sales tracking service, which is very important for separating serious offenders from small timers. As a welcome side-effect, marketplace sales tracking also lets you gain valuable insights into how well your products are doing on one of the biggest global online marketplaces on the planet.

As for Snapchat, our social media monitoring service is perfectly cut out for the job. With the advent of social commerce, social media monitoring has become a fixed part of a comprehensive online brand protection program, scanning seller profiles, ads, listings and much more for IP infringing content. We’ll discover potentially harmful seller profiles on Snapchat and monitor their activities to detect infringements on your IP rights. In addition, any seller activity on social media, including Snapchat ads gives us more information about sellers and their sales channels, which in turn brings us closer to the origin of infringements.

Whether separately or teamed up, eBay and Snapchat are important actors in both e-Commerce and social commerce. globaleyez is ready to tackle the challenges these (and many, many other) platforms may pose for your brand’s IP rights.

Don’t wait around for trouble to knock on your door; contact us and let us put up a comprehensive online brand protection program to ensure the safety of your IP rights.