Is promoting everything a good idea?

Personally, I have not been promoting much at all. At one time, I did promote a few items that were recommended by eBay’s bot. All the items were ones that I have had for a while.

You and I may scroll past sponsored items because we know what goes on the behind the scenes. However, I believe eBay when they say that the promotion helps sell an item, but what they don’t really say is that it is more effective for new commodity items. It isn’t as effective for used and vintage items that don’t have as much competition.

Right now, sales are sporadic. What you might see as a screeching halt just might be fluctuations as kids go back to school and parents are busy with other stuff. That said, I don’t recommend promoting items unless they’ve been sitting around for a year or more.

On a completely different topic, seems like you started posting in the forum less than a year ago as a fairly new eBay seller. If you now have 750 items in your store, then you really have built up your store well. Congratulations!

I promote everything I can at 1%.   It seems like a worthwhile price to pay for extra exposure.  The reporting shows you the number of sales that were made via those clicks and it seems worthwhile.

It’s highly unlikely that using that promoted listing feature caused a drop in sales.  Ebay would kill that feature off in a heartbeat if there was any proof that it caused a loss of sales.

I was actively promoting, and making sales, but someone on the forum mentioned there was no point if your item is one of a few. I’ve been actively cancelling promotions and it hasn’t really made much difference.

Personally, I think promotions are a money making gimmick for eBay with no real benefit to anyone, but with the added annoyance of seeing the same item twice if you’re a buyer searching for something specific. But it’s just my opinion, and as they say….

I’m with you, Amatino. I don’t use promoted listings at all. At first I used it a little bit, just to take advantage of the promoted listing credit, but it was taking up too much room in my brain thinking about it and wondering if it worked and checking to see whether my credit was applied or not, so I stopped.

I don’t spend much time playing with Promoted Listings (or any sales campaigns) anymore.  It’s pretty much list it and forget it for me.  The only thing I do these days is every couple of months I’ll end the current promoted listing campaign and start a new one to pick up my new listings.

These days I focus on the offers-to-watchers feature which has far more tangible and immediate results for me.  I hope ebay gave a nice big pay raise to the bright sparks that proposed and implemented that feature.

I’m promoting everything and have played with different % but I can’t really say for sure if it helps since there are so many other variables that can affect sales and all of us have too low a volume to get any reliable data I think.

Even if you promote a listing it still can show up unpromoted, and sometimes ahead of the promoted listing.  I look at the sales of both promoted and unpromoted, just scanning the sold page and not taking the time to tally those up, as a guess 75% of my sales were promoted.  No way to know if I would have received those anyway but I’m really hesitant to do anything right now that might lower my sales since the numbers have been down lately.

I would not use promoted listing on rare or collectible or unique items with no direct competition, that would be just throwing away money, they will see when the right buyer comes along in my opinion.

If you are a top rated seller (TSR), you get a $30 per quarter rebate on promoted listings so you should try to maximize that perk. I usually put much of my store (900+ listings) at 2% and then adjust up and down based on how close to $30 I am. Today is the 17th, the 30th is the end of the quarter, and I have spent $27 on promoted listings this quarter at a 2.13% average promoted rate. If I go a little over the $30 or come up just short, fine. But I love the extra exposure.

I did some calculating and my normal sales conversion rate on non-promoted items this quarter was is 1.38%, and the promoted items is was a 1.43%. So if you do the math, promoted listings (at ~2%) you convert about  3.6% more clickthroughs into converted sales. So for zero cost that is worth it, but if you put a high promoted rate you might just break even (or even lose money) at that conversion rate.

Obviously if you set a higher promoted percentage you might get a higher conversion rate also, but I can only comment on my store’s data, and probably will not do that kind of test.

I have 2 seller IDs that are TRS ; one with a Basic store and one with no store. but am not using hardly any promoted listings. If there is a rebate/credit system, maybe I am missing out. or Perhaps I am not qualified?

Can anyone please provide a link as to where the requirements are for $30 per quarter rebate on promoted listing fees?

@mickdog: Thanks for the details.