The difference between Featured First and Featured Plus has many sellers confused as to which they should use and which has the best benefits.
Featured Plus
Featured Plus is the older listing enhancement, it adds extra visibility to a listing by duplicating it at the top of the search results page.
Your listing will only be in featured section of the page it naturally falls on in search, so if your listing is on page 39 of search results Featured Plus will duplicate your listing at the top of page 39.
Featured Plus is great if your fixed price listing in Best Match is on the first page of search results, auctions will naturally appear on the first page as they get close to the finish time. It’s not so great if you’re still appearing on page 39 and that’s where Featured First comes in.
Featured First
Featured First will lift your listing to the top of page 1 of search results, but in a rotation with any other listings that have the enhancement. There are two slots reserved at the top of the first page of search results and any matching listings with the Featured Plus listing enhancement will appear in rotation in this slot. Your listing will still appear on the search results page it naturally falls on.
There has been confusion as in the past Featured Plus often boosted listings to the first page of search results. This was actually a programming error which has been corrected and Featured Plus items now will only appear at the top of the page they naturally fall on.
Gallery Featured
Gallery Featured was an old listing enhancement which has been retired. Gallery Featured worked in a similar way to Featured Plus, but would boost a listing to the top of search results when viewed as a gallery rather than the default list view. Gallery Featured is no longer available and has been replaced with Featured First.
In summary Featured Plus boosts your listing to the top of the page of search results that it naturally appears on. Featured First may display your listing in the featured section at the top of page 1 of search results, but only in rotation with other listings which have Featured Plus applied.
The best situation is for your listing to naturally appear on page 1 of search results and then to apply the Featured Plus listing enhancement – that guarantees your product will be one of the first a buyer sees when they search for your item.
Glitch or design?
While writing this post it’s been discovered that Featured Plus listings will only appear once in search results if they naturally fall on page 1 of search results.
This behavior isn’t what’s expected – the listing should still appear in the search results slot it naturally falls on as well as in the featured section of the page. Featured Plus listings on page 2 or higher of search results are displayed as expected in both the featured section as well as their normal position, lower down the search results page.
This may be because eBay want the first page of search results to show as many different listings as possible and are suppressing duplicates, or it may be yet another search glitch. We’ll update you as soon as we have more information.
3 Responses
One other thing to mention is that you get gallery plus free with featured first, but the enhancement seems to stay with the listing even when the fetured first promotion has ended, for example I listed a 30 day BIN +GTC, and put a seven day featured first on the listing over two weeks ago and the gallery plus still shows
#1 Ohhh that’s nice to know 🙂
to see featured first and featured plus working together do a search for glow sticks on ebay,co,uk and select view all items,
the top two listings are both ours, the carnivalsupplies listing is just a plain old featured plus, with a autorelist on it,
the second listing by glosticks listing was a listing that used to be a seven day bin and had good sales , but we coverted to a 30 day + GTC, we started this listing with a featured first for seven day, hence the gallery plus and then when the featured first ran out, added featured plus, but as mentioned above notice that none of these two listings appear on the first page of search outside of the featured area.
It was fairly important to us to hit the two top spots straight away due to the product type this is our peak selling season.