Promoted Listings – Going Down The Rabbit Hole

You get placement on the search results pages, as well as a number of other places on eBay. eBay has expanded the locations over time, I’m not sure there’s a complete, up to date list available. My gut feeling: for my type of stuff, the search results page placement is not as important as the other places.

“Promoted Listings may appear throughout our network, including desktop and mobile search results, and product pages. Placement and ranking are influenced by a variety of factors, including ad rate, listing quality, relevancy, and competing listings.”

The results of the only real test of PL that I’ve seen:

https://tamebay.com/2019/02/ebay-promoted-listings-have-a-significant-effect-on-salesexperimental-results.html

I think Promoted Listings has plenty of issues, but its mysterious at all. eBay explains it all here: https://pages.ebay.com/seller-center/listing-and-marketing/promoted-listings.html

You choose what percentage you want to pay to promote which then determines how often your listing is promoted.

The issue I have is that eBay has decided this is their way to boost profit. Instead of letting the most relevant results to be shows, they make people pay to be shown.

I think, in effect, your listing is shown twice in search results. I was searching for some supplies for costumes and I noticed that I was getting duplicates of listing that I’d already looked at. After it happened a few times, I started paying attention and noticed that there are listings that say “SPONSORED” that show up again in the general listings.

Jay, I see it as basic business. ebay—ecommerce generally—is highly competitive. Most sellers look for things that give them a competitive edge. Most such things either cost money or time. For example, I can gain a competitive edge by reading this Board and listening to the podcast…doesn’t cost me anything but time. I can gain an edge by finding a really inexpensive source for shipping supplies. I can gain an edge by sometimes paying up at auctions and thrifts to buy stuff that will increase my ASP….spending more to make more And I can gain an edge by paying for PLs….same thing, spending more to make more.

Each seller has to decide for himself whether spending more time or money is worth it for his business.

I don’t worry about ebay making more money from me if I make sales through PL. I only worry about whether the cost to me is worth it or not. Same as I worry about whether paying $40 at an auction for something is going to be worth it when the item sells. I don’t worry that the auctioneer is going to make more money from me…that’s his job. ebay’s job is to make money from sellers and buyers.

Amatino, that’s correct. But the OPs question was about: where else BESIDES the search page results do PLs show up? When PL began, there were just a very few placements other than the Search results page…they’ve been adding more over time. WHile I have no proof, I strongly suspect that a lot of my PL sales are the result of a buyer seeing one of my items on a page OTHER than the search results page. Most of my stuff, if the buyer has a fairly narrow search, will show up on the first page of search results without PL. I use PL because I want the OTHER placements.

I haven’t used PL’s because I feel that most of my items have little or no competition, and my pricing, condition, or location will make the sale.

I find it odd when promoted listings show up in search results for items I buy – sometimes the promoted listing appears below the actual listing, and when the search result only brings up 1 item, the same item appears twice. In some categories, I just find it annoying to have the same items come up over and over again in the search results.

I’m not sure where else PLs show up – I get a lot of banner ads for eBay on other websites, and they just show items I looked at – not specifically promoted items.

Also, all the “studies” or “tests” I see on promoted listings seem too vague statistically, and don’t show a net increase in $s, just sales over a short period. Would like to see some really good data over a longer period (1 year) of almost identical items, the total cost, and the total net income gain/loss by using PLs before using them.

Promoted listings exist as a stealth fee increase for sellers, and an annoyance for buyers that have to see the same items twice.

I still don’t see any advantage to it, so I don’t use it. It might work for smaller inventories with more competition for common items. I don’t know.

I find PL’s drive the views up, with low conversion. Maybe you could argue my price is too high then. I actually just ended a bunch of listings with high views and 5+ watchers and I’m going to let them go stealth for awhile and revive them later as an experiment.