Dive Brief:

• EBay Inc. plans to test a self-service “Promoted Listings” tool, where sellers can pay to boost search positions on certain items, Internet Retailer reports.

• The pilot will begin in June, and a landing page with some details is available as of Tuesday, according to the report.

• The Promoted Listings ads will appear on eBay’s desktop website and mobile apps.

Dive Insight:

Search is key to e-commerce, and eBay is leveraging data that is better targeted and more accurately tied to search, which makes things easier for shoppers (who are then more likely to buy). 

Incoming eBay CEO Devin Wenig, who takes the reins after the marketplace’s split from payment unit PayPal later this year, has said that employing structured data in this way is a top priority and the only way to solve the site’s issues with search optimization. Those problems came to a head last year when changes to Google’s search engine, and eBay’s response to it, may have cost the marketplace some $200 million as searches failed to drive traffic.