An advertising program that lets eBay merchants in the U.S. and Canada pay to promote their wares on the site has been shelved and ads will stop running in early August.
The AdCommerce ad program, launched last year, provides pay-per-click text ads that run along with results from eBay's search engine.
Similar to Google's AdWords program, AdCommerce lets merchants pick search keywords to trigger their ads. Merchants also decide how much they're willing to pay when someone clicks on their ad. When merchants pick the same keywords, the ads of those who pay the most per click appear first.
The reasoning for closing the program is that eBay wants its search engine to only reflect the most relevant results and not show items that only appear because merchants paid to have them there.
"We are confident that consistently displaying the most relevant items highest in the search results is in the best interest of buyers, sellers and the eBay marketplace overall," reads an official blog post from eBay.
Strangely, eBay isn't extending that reasoning to other regions, since it will maintain the program in Europe and Australia. The company didn't respond to a request for comment.
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