Mobile Marketing that Makes Sense!

E-bay Shopping Widgets

I have been trying out the new E-bay Shopping widgets, and am having trouble getting them to display both on traditional and mobile devices. I tried adding them to my MySpace profile, and that didn’t work(-probably because it is flash based), and so I have tried adding them here, and that didn’t work either. I must be doing something wrong. Other than getting the widget to display, the main thing that I noticed was that the e-Bay shopping widget that I chose require at least 500 available pixel width. The widgets can also be set to display as a percent which might make them more mobile compatible, but the specific pixel width could cause problems in a lot of sites. I am still testing, but my guess is that the e-Bay shopping widget might be hard to put in a side bar, but much easier to add near the bottom of the page in a main column. To see some other examples of other existing Advertising Widgets check out this article on Tech Crunch by Michael Arrington called Attack of the Advertising Widgets.

Shopping widgets are going to offer a unique twist on affiliate style marketing, but it is not clear how they will impact mobile marketing. Many of these widgets are designed in Flash, which is not universally accepted on mobile devices, so if advertisers are interested in making their widgets work on mobile devices they should consider developing them in Flash Light instead, or creating them using dynamically placed images instead.

The E-bay widget should be included just below this paragraph, but as mentioned, I am still having technical difficulty. I also tried creating a new page and eliminating the side bar, to make sure there is enough room width-wise, but it still hasn’t showed. Here are some links f you want to look at the source code and let me know what I can do to get it to work: http://www.rank-mobile.com/E-BayWidget.html. Here it is with the sidebar still intact: http://www.rank-mobile.com/E-BayWidget2.html. And the one time I got it to work there were no more elements on the page: http://www.rank-mobile.com/E-BayWidget3.html. Since it worked when nothing else was on the page I am guessing I just need to find a narrower widget, or that my CSS or CMS is somehow preventing it from displaying.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 7, 2007 at 5:32 am and is filed under Mobile Banners & Advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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