Amazon Paid You $5 to Leave a Store; Now eBay Is Giving You $10 to Return
EBay is partnering with three major retailers to get online shoppers to also buy at brick-and-mortar stores. — The partnership is an obvious comeback to last weekend's promotion by Amazon, which motivated consumers …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the second December running that eBay has paid shoppers to walk into physical stores — its 2010 offline-shopping push set the template, and this year's $10 offer with three major retailers doubles down on the same bet. The timing is pointed: it lands days after Amazon's $5-per-visit promotion and amid Amazon reporting more than a million Kindles sold per week for three straight weeks.
The backdrop is Amazon's aggressive holiday posture — a loss-leading $199 Kindle Fire launched earlier in December and demand the company says is accelerating into the holidays. eBay, which owns no comparable device funnel, is answering with retail partnerships instead: positioning itself as the marketplace that sends customers to stores rather than around them.
First-order effects
- Three major retailers get paid foot traffic during the highest-stakes shopping week of the year, with eBay funding the incentive to make its marketplace look like an ally of brick-and-mortar rather than a threat.
Second-order effects
- Amazon and eBay are now openly bidding cash for the same shopper's errand — if the $5-versus-$10 escalation continues, in-store visit subsidies become a recurring line item in holiday marketing budgets rather than a one-off stunt.
Third-order effects
- If retailers keep taking marketplace money to host rival channels' customers, the showroom becomes a negotiated asset — store space priced by whoever pays for the visit, and the online/offline boundary treated by both Amazon and eBay as a marketing surface rather than a moat.
The trend: Marketplaces are shifting from competing over where shoppers buy to subsidizing where they physically stand, turning store visits themselves into auctionable inventory.