Promoted listings on ebay. Any good?

[ourphonecase]

Just got a message from eBay that I have been selected to sell via eBay Promoted Listings tool. Never heard of it before but it claims it puts your listings at the front for a price. The structure looks like google adwords and you only pay for it when it sells.

Has anyone done this and are able to share their experience with us before I decide to do this or not?

[Anonymous]

Seems awfully quiet at the forum regarding this 'Promoted Listings' stuff.

Maybe those who are using it don't want any competitors' ears pricking up

and hearing success stories.

[stuffedwithplush]

Nope...

Its because only a few people have access too it yet.... and its underperforming.

[clarry100]

Essentially you are adding some chosen percentage onto your FVF for the possible privilege of having your listings show up higher in the search results. Presumably the more you pay the higher up they get.

We have found that by adding 1% we were still flooded by the Chinese sellers in our particular category. So no apparent boost in sales.

So 1% added appears to make no difference. Perhaps if you were game to try more it might make a bigger difference. Anyone???

To our thinking you had better promote your poor sellers as by promoting your good sellers all you are doing is paying more FVF for what would likely have been a sale anyway at the lesser FVF. Perhaps I'm a bit cynical but we don't think its worth it. Limited value IMHO.

They only offered it to us on our store that is already performing reasonably well. We would have rathered it was on the under performing store. But when I called them to request that they switch it to our other store they declined to entertain that idea.

[dylan11235813]

I got sent the invitation yesterday but I could only add 6 of my listings (out of 500)

I thought they placed adds to other places on the site (like down the right hand side) and didn't actually affect the actual listing ranking.

[digital*ghost]

I haven't run any campaigns myself, but out of curiosity, I ran a search to look for promoted listings - my adblocker (on both Chrome and Firefox) usually prevents any from showing up in the sidebar(s). I switched from ending soonest (my default sort order) to best match - no promoted listings in normal search results, but there were two at the very end of the search results, separated from the rest (like how international items often are).

I have seen a different style of promoted listings, where there is a few products at the top of the page in a scrolling gallery, but they're always from the same store, so not promoted listings as such, but a showcase to promote a specific (always big-name) store and I think that's something that's not accessible to the majority of sellers (i.e. it'd be part of the exclusive advertisting deals they offer big name stores when they entice them here), so even with promoted listings, you don't really get 'headlining act', so to speak. 

eBay also decides how relevant your item is to the buyer's search terms, and then if there are competing listings, they will (probably) go for the one who is paying the most. 

I think if you sell in a relatively competitive category (but perhaps not flooded, because that increases the chance there'll be a lot of other sellers competing with promoted listings as well), but have a really eye-catching product / product images, it might be worth an extra percent or two - based on the fact that I know my adblockers (for some unknown reason) don't always block the sidebar advertisements, and every now and then one of the images will jump out at me and I click to look at something I wasn't even really searching for (eg say I'm searching for crystal beads, ads in the sidebar just seem to take the 'crystal' bit and will show me things like crystal glasses). 

It's good that you only pay if someone who clicked on an ad goes on to buy the item, but in all honesty how can you be certain they found you that way, you only have eBay's stats to go on, and the integrity of their data is questionable at times.... o_o

[allsafetysolutions1]

Hi. I have done this myself approx 2 weeks ago. I have it set at 20% on 5 of my items. There has been over 300 "impressions" and wait for it.......1 sale. Not sure if it makes your listings higher up in the rankings as mine are not as far up as I thought they would be.

the only good thing about it, I think, is that you only pay the extra 20% when someone clicks on the item and buys.

[clarry100]

Yes you are right Dylan.

Out of our 180 odd listings we could only choose 4 maximum.

All up we considered it a bit of a time waster.

[clarry100]

*** NEWS FLASH ***

We have just now received the email invitation on our other store.

The one I mentiond above that we would have liked it on originally as its the under-performing one.

And the one they declined to offer it on when we questioned them about it.

So now to decide if/not we might give it one more chance to work on this store.

Not feeling overly confident tho I have to say.

[heihachi_73]

"Promoted listings on ebay. Any good?"

No they are not, why the $@#! do brand new Xbox One games now show up at the bottom of every page inside the search results when I'm looking up old PlayStation 1 and 2 games? So far, the "Promoted" listings are even more useless than the garbage spewed out of the "Popular on eBay" column! Just another way for eBay to spam everyone with even more useless çrap in order for them to make a few more bucks at the expense of sellers. If I see a completely unrelated listing in the search results when I'm looking for something specific, that seller can get {word-rhyming-with-duct} as far as I care - it reminds me exactly of going into Coles or whatever where they have the counter piled high with chocolates in order to get a few more bucks from the buyer. I'm waiting for the day a lawnmower, cosmetics or a Ford Falcon station wagon shows up as a "Promoted" item in the video game section to prove how useless eBay is becoming.