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Jay, Right, no stick, just carrot.
Jay, as to the new sites, I agree. Time will tell whether their attraction lasts very long. One thing I always said about etsy: etsy will eventually resemble ebay in many ways, because as it grows it encounters the same issues ebay already encountered, and will solve them in much the same way. And, in my6 opinion, that is what has happened. I suspect the same for sites like Poshmark: as they grow, so will their list of rules, so will their supposed “micromanagement”, etc. And for some sellers, that will reduce the appeal. And, as the sites grow, so will the competition on the site, which will likely (as it did on ebay) drive down prices and sales for some things because of supply and demand.
I’m like you: I really don’t know about sellers of new stuff, but for our kind of stuff, even if we are the victims of management’s benign neglect. we are still finding buyers for our stuff. I think it still comes down to the individual seller to make it work.
Looking at that rather lengthy post: I don’t want to be a Debby Downer. I think eBay is still a good place to sell used stuff, and I do think it will remain a good place into the foreseeable future.
Years ago, before ebay stores were integrated into ebay search (for you younger folks, ebay stores were originally off to the side, you might say…if buyers knew they existed, they could search within the stores section)…anyway, years ago, ebay provided an FVF discount for sales that were generated from off ebay by the seller. (In other words, if I had a blog, and mentioned one of my items URLs in it, and used the referral code with the URL, and a buyer bought from that referral, I got a discount. I would love to see ebay bring back something like this, and maybe limit to certain categories (such as collectibles). I think this would give ebay sellers a lot more incentive to use Pinterst, FB etc to send buyers to ebay. Many sellers already do this, but I think it could make a real difference, especially for our type of stuff. What do you guys think?
Our sales are up, but so are our listings and our ASP. We o use Promoted Listings and Promotions Manager to a greater extant than before. Still, I too feel ebay is not setting the retail world on fire this quarter.
I’m sure there are a number of factors at work here. One is competition. As some have noted, newer sites like Poshmark , Facebook Marketplace, and Mercari are growing, and they are likely growing primarily at eBay’s expense. And some are clearly targeting the audience ebay most covets: millennials. Add to this the fact that, in order to better compete against Amazon, sites like WalMart , Best Buy, and Target have ramped up their online efforts, which may be taking market share from Amazon, but also from the lower hanging fruit, eBay.
And when it comes to new merchandise, eBay IS lower hanging fruit: it has no physical infrastructure to guarantee the fast shipping millenials seem to crave, and it has yet to fully implement its Product Pages, which means it is still WAY behind on something that should have been in place years ago. I think Wenig is right, Product Pages are important and necessary, but they are only table stakes: even once (perhaps I should say IF) ebay has finally successfully implemented them, basically, they just bring ebay to a point most sites are already at.
Then there is eBay’s marketing. While ebay does seem to have ramped up its marketing for Q4 (and maybe they are doing great with it, I don’t know), the marketing is clearly not designed to bring buyers to our merchandise—it is designed to tell buyers: Look, we have lots of shiny new stuff here, and you can buy it right now, not wait for an auction to end! I understand eBay’s point: they feel too many people still think of them as the old , auction oriented, used stuff site, and they need to transform that image. To me, the problem is: what in the new image REALLY differentiates them from Amazon, WalMart, and so forth? I’ve seen some of the TV ads, and you could pretty much replace the ebay logo with any one of a number of other sites, and the ad would still be pretty much the same thing.
So far, none of the ads have really come across as Christmasy to me, and Christmas, which, for so many people, centers around nostalgia and tradition, is a perfect time for ebay to differentiate themselves by pushing our kind of stuff. Are they doing that? No. So, while they MIGHT be doing a good job of pushing their Daily Deals stuff out the door, our stuff is being pushed aside. I don’t mean that ebay WANTS to push us aside, I just mean that , inevitably, if the focus is on new, the used does not get seen as well as it would if ebay were giving it some marketing focus.
I think ultimately it comes down to ebay’s failure to reinvent itself after the novelty of auctions faded. What ebay has going for it is it still has some name recognition. But what really differentiates it from its competitors? With WalMart, I can order online and pick up an item in the store. Can’t do that with eBay. Amazon prime not only includes free shipping and so forth, but movies and more. eBay offers nothing remotely like that. I do think ebay is trying, really trying , to stay relevant, but, aside from the wealth of oddball stuff we supply, what does it have that really differentiates it? And what happens to it as more and more of our kind of stuff migrates to other sites?
eBay’s biggest advantage is what it has always been: it has no inventory, no cost of acquisition, no storage costs and so forth. That is what allows it to be profitable. But it also a disadvantage: it has much less control over what appears on the site, at what price, how quickly things ship, and so forth.
I haven’t yet posted to the 2019 thread, but when I do, “adding more platforms” will be on the list. eBay is still worth selling on, and hopefully will be for a long time to come, but , to me, its future is cloudy at best.
12/04/2018 at 12:28 pm in reply to: Promoted listings experiment RESULTS: Reducing all promoted listings to 1% rate #52651I just switched from 4% across the Board to Trending Rates across the Board, and if this works well, I’ll stick with it or go higher. I have two thoughts: 1. Like you, we have the margins for this. I suspect it may be harder to justify for sellers of new items working with thinner margins, but I can handle this, especially if it really ramps up my sales velocity. 2. I suspect most of my PL sales are NOT the result of my PL listing showing higher on the search results page, but rather of my PL listing showing up on other pages, where it is more likely to sell as an impulse buy than something someone was definitely searching for.
I also suspect there may be an advantage for our type of stuff because many sellers of used stuff focus only on the search page impact. I’ve seen many sellers say : My stuff shows up on the first page anyway, because it’s an oddball type item, so why pay eBay more? They don’t consider the value of having PL items show up on other pages…
12/04/2018 at 9:09 am in reply to: Promoted listings experiment RESULTS: Reducing all promoted listings to 1% rate #52629Retro, Are most of your listings multi quantity listings, or one offs? I’ve basically heard the same thing about campaigns for multi quantity listings—they start to taper off IF PL is not generating sufficient sales per listing for the algo, because ebay will start promoting other listings for the same item from competitors. If that’s true, I would guess there’s somewhat less of that effect for one offs.
12/03/2018 at 10:38 am in reply to: Promoted listings experiment RESULTS: Reducing all promoted listings to 1% rate #52575Wow! That is quite a difference. I’ve been using a flat 4%, and I’ve had some PL sales, but given the very competitive Holiday Season, I’m thinking I’ll bump that up to trending rates.I gather you were doing the Trending Rate, not TR Plus .1% or anything like that?
A common mistake—they may look to the untrained eye like hockey pants, but they are, in fact, a sleeping bag/fortress of solitude.
11/17/2018 at 9:29 pm in reply to: Promoted listings experiment RESULTS: Reducing all promoted listings to 1% rate #51882Yep, I get what you are saying about 1%. My choice of 4% was kind of arbitrary: at 4% I figure even if I’m running a sale on everything, I can handle 4% because of my margins. The better half is experimenting with 1%.
One thing I’ve noticed (I’m using the workaround, don’t have the Seller Hub version) is that ebay tells me how many watchers are on the item, and then how many watchers are getting the offer. I’ve had some with 4 watchers, only 1 was sent the offer. I’m not sure how ebay decides this, but I think it might help reduce the “buyer habit” of watching and waiting for the discount….the fact that the buyer might not be the one to get the discount might mean the buyer will make an offer up front, or will learn not to wait, but to buy.
11/17/2018 at 6:18 pm in reply to: Promoted listings experiment RESULTS: Reducing all promoted listings to 1% rate #51875I’m a very small seller. I sold three items today, 2 were with the 4% PL. I have no way of knowing whether they would have sold without it, but I’m perfectly happy to pay the extra 4% given my high margins.
11/17/2018 at 6:05 pm in reply to: Promoted listings experiment RESULTS: Reducing all promoted listings to 1% rate #51873ChristineR, I agree with your advice: do it on the cheap, can’t hurt to try (espeically since most of us have roomy margins).
But I’ll stress again, eBay’s algo would have no trouble ranking PLs based ONLY on the rate. The algo is much MORE sophisticated than that, taking into consideration a whole range of factors (both buyer side and seller side) The reason ebay does NOT use only the rate is that it would be counter-productive, both for sellers/buyers and for eBay. As I said, 4% of a sale is something, but 10% (or 50%) of a non-sale is: Nothing.
eBay’s CEO likes to tell stock analysts about the dollar amount PL brings in for eBay, but the number the PL team is really concerned with is the conversion rate for items they actually promoted.
Jay, This IS showing up in Seller Hub, but it’s a gradual roll out. And I think the Seller Hub version may be a little more sophisticated (I don’t have it yet, everyone should have it eventually, probably sometime in early 2019.)
11/17/2018 at 6:35 am in reply to: Promoted listings experiment RESULTS: Reducing all promoted listings to 1% rate #51834Antique Frog, Only way to find out is to try it. LOL When PL started, ebay had an arbitrary limit of, as I recall, 20%. A while ago, they eliminated that, so sellers have as much flexibility as they want, to go as low or as high as they choose. I have never seen the trending rate come anywhere close to 50%, much less 100%.
As I explained above, I doubt even 100% would do a seller much good if the listing was , say, way over-priced or the seller lad terrible feedback, etc.
11/16/2018 at 10:08 pm in reply to: Promoted listings experiment RESULTS: Reducing all promoted listings to 1% rate #51828I’ve been running PLs at a flat 4% for a little while now, and it has brought me some sales. A few thoughts:
1. While eBay does hint that its good to use trending rate or a little above it, it’s important to realize that the rate is NOT the ONLY factor ebay looks at. I discussed this briefly with an eBay PL team member at eBay Open….ebay is looking at both whatever data they have on the buyer conducting the search , as well as the PL pool of items : relevancy, price, in some cases, proximity to buyer, and much more. The fact is, my item at 4% has a very real chance of getting preference over another PL item at 10%. (I see a lot of sellers on the eBay Boards and Facebook groups who say it’s ALL about the rate, because ebay wants the highest rate for the highest FVF. What they miss about this is: eBay wants sales velocity. If eBay’s algorithm is telling ebay that my item at 4% has a better chance of actually selling than the item at 10%, I’ll get preference—-because 4% of something is better than 10% of nothing.)
2. Related to this: I’m reading between the lines just a little here, but my impression is the PL team is judged less on the dollar amount of fees they bring in, and more on the percentage of successes they have. When I list something, I’m hoping it will find a buyer. When the PL team promotes a listing, they are betting it will sell. This is one reason they started recommending which listings we should promote…because their algo was telling them those listings had a better shot of selling if promoted. One reason they can’t hit home runs all the time is because sometimes there’s only one listing for that item in the PL pool, and it’s a non-competitive listing….
3. I often see sellers claim there’s no reason to promote listings like ours (used, antiques, etc), that PL is only useful for sellers in highly competitive categories with new merch. Well, I agree that for many of my items, if the buyer has been specific enough in his search terms/filters, my item will be on the first page of search results whether PL or not. But here’s my guess: When my PL items sell, I suspect they are often selling NOT because of their placement on the search results page, but because of their placement on OTHER pages, such as a product page or seller’s listing page, etc. PLs show up in a number of places, and in those cases they aren’t usually surrounded by tons of the same thing. In fact, the PL algo can show buyers stuff that isn’t exactly what the buyer is searching for, but turns out to be something the buyer likes. So, my oddball item shows up on some other page in front of just the right buyer, and I make the sale.
4. It all comes back to the team’s incentive: to show the right item at the right time to the right buyer to make the sale.
5. I agree with Mike, I can go higher than 4% and might do that as the Holidays wear on….the great thing about sourcing as most of us do is that we have high margins that can handle this sort of thing. I think PL is well worth it, even if it only sells a small percentage of my stuff.
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