I'm a little over the expense of Promoted listings on Ebay, especially with this new change:
"We’ll be expanding what we qualify and report as an Attributed Sale for Promoted Listings Standard to include when a buyer clicks on one of your Standard ads and then purchases any of your Promoted Listings Standard items within 30 days."
This implies that if I've promoted a listing at a rate of 20% which a buyer clicks or likes, then the buyer buys a different one I promoted at 2%, I get charged 20%. Obviously, I would be selecting advertising rates that are appropriate for different products, but this change would seem to make that irrelevant. I've had a look at the T&C but as it's about a mile long of turgid contract speak and the important details are of course omitted from the email announcement, I can't figure it out.
When you're selling in volume, promoted listings are almost a necessity on Ebay and this has gotten worse with time. It seems to me that the percentage used to scale somewhat more linearly with the advertising percentage, but now it seems there is a minimum effective percentage you need before you really get any sales boost worth mentioning.
I don't mind paying for prime spots, but I *do* mind that this translates into rather massive additional fees. Undoubtedly this is manipulated by Ebay to maximise the fees, since Ebay is not transparent regarding the method of bidding (probably one area there needs to be more regulation around).
By comparison, I also sell on Amazon and can spend a much smaller and reasonable amount and see a decent return on my advertising spend. I only see a similar boost in sales on Ebay if I literally pour money into Promoted listings.
At the end of the day, if I have to decimate my margin to get sales, I'll have to scale back on Ebay and focus on other marketplaces.
Not happy about this.
