Promoted Listings - Very clever ebay !!!!

[chameleon54]

Ebay has been pushing hard with its promoted listings programme lately and I suspect it is starting to gain traction. If you want your items to have positive visibility with buyers, you can choose to pay an extra fee ( promoted listing ). You choose how much extra commission you are willing to pay ebay for the extra visibility. The higher the % of extra final value fee, the more visible your listing becomes.

The real trick with the plan is that ebay suggests you pay above the average fee in order to jump the ever growing line of promoted listings and gain higher visibility. Over time as more sellers use the system and get hooked on better sales from promoted listings, the higher they will need to bid ( higher extra fees paid to ebay ) in order to stay ahead of the pack.

When it started, 5% would get you pretty high up the pecking order and above the average in most catagories. . Now ?  If you are selling collectables you will need to pay an extra 12.3% in commission just to meet the average promoted listing. Australian stamps, 15.23 %, AFL & Cricket memorabilia above 15.6% and general sports memorabilia 19%.

https://pages.ebay.com/promoted-listings/adrates.html#au

As more sellers jump onto the programme, the promoted listings will take up the first few pages of searches and those not in the programme will slowly sink into oblivian. If you want to be on the first page of listings, you may have to pay ebay 30% commission. ie. 10% normal fee plus 20% promoted listing fee in order to jump to the front of other sellers.

For sellers of generic items and saturated catagories, such as electronic accessories and sporting goods, this is going to take some adjusting too. No wonder ebay are keen to see this scheme fly. It should be a nice little earner for them.

[dontmissthese]

Yes it's a good little earner for ebay but it still beats

the carp out of Pay Per Click ( where your competitors

cost you money when they sticky beak ).

[screamingdemon_2007]

Yeah, certainly some clever thinking behind it, but not enough on their part.  They will get  quick boost in income for a start, but once everyone gets on board it will turn the tides.

Sellers will quickly realise once everyone is onboard they are theoraticlly back where they started except paying a lot more to be there. Seriously with recent low performance across ebay in general these extra fees just to remain in the game are going to be the tipping point for a lot of sellers.

Saddly, I think we are one of the stores that will be pulling out due to this.  After 11yrs of selling on ebay we are in search of an alternative platform or simply changing our business direction.

[4476.iveco]

Promoted listings used to help our sales as we had promoted listings plus our normal listing i.e double exposure.  This used to give us between 15 & 30 listings on the 1st page, but this has now changed with either a promoted listing or normal listing, so now we get between 2 & 6 on the 1st page.  The strange thing is that mostly buyers chose the normal listing to buy from , so the promoted listing fee was quite small overall.

Yes I agree that it won't be viable to use in the future, but we will see what happens.

[knewdoors]

promoted listings worked big time for us when we first used them..but like anything on ebay...there is no such thing as "good times" or "solid sales"..we promote all of our listings yet sales have dried up...The Algorithm is the enemy of prosperity..