eBay have announced that from late June a new feature will enable sellers to increase the velocity of sales through greater exposure on the site.
Jordan Sweetnam, Vice President, eBay Seller Experience, wanted to let Tamebay readers know that the aim of Promoted Listings is to help sellers build sales velocity. That’s why it’s not CPM (pay when your ad is seen), CPC (pay when someone clicks on your ad) or indeed any form of CPA (cost per action). eBay Promoted Listings will be linked to success so you’ll only pay when you get a sale.
Pay on results differs from previous ad programs on eBay (such as AdCommerce) where you paid regardless of whether your ad resulted in a sale or not and also incentives eBay to continue to display adverts where buyers purchase and dump adverts for under performing listings which buyers ignore.
You can bid between 1% and 20% of the sale price for Promoted Listings. The program will be limited to eBay Shops subscribers and you’ll also have to be an above standard rated seller. This is not a program where dodgy sellers will be able to buy visibility and indeed if you’re listing doesn’t perform well, even if you bid 20% of the sale price, it won’t be promoted.
Initially Promoted Listings will be available to hand picked selected sellers in the US, UK, Germany and Australia and will be for multiple quantity fixed price items.
eBay are putting a ton of effort behind this program so for instance having a great selling item, hiking the price and bidding on Promoted Listings just won’t work. Items that give a great buyer experience will be those promoted and eBay will soon learn if they display your listing and no one buys it.
To start with it’s expected that Promoted Listings will appear at the bottom of search results, but as tests progress other positions on the page may be tested.
There are several use cases where we expect to see sellers use Promoted Listings. One is of course if you have a new or seasonal line and wish to give it a kick start in Best Match. Until you’ve built up a Recent Sales score in Best Match, Promoted listings could be a way to raise the profile of your listing and start building sales velocity.
Another use would be when you have an unbranded or own brand product where buyers won’t search for your brand name, Promoted Listings give you the ability to get your inventory shown when a buyer searches for similar items.
Promoted Listings management will be on the eBay site (at launch there will be no API support so it won’t be accessible in third party tools). Promoted Listings will also be an on-eBay experience, however when asked eBay said that off-site promotion “could be very well something that we could consider down the line”.
We know sellers who loved AdCommerce and were peeved when eBay discontinued that program. We think those sellers will probably think Promoted Listings is even better and want to be among the first to start using them. Currently we’ve only got a link to the eBay.com sign up page, so if you’re interested in participating in Promoted Listings on eBay.com you can there.
UK sellers don’t need to register their interest – for the pilot eBay will be inviting sellers to participate over the course of the next few months. Information pages will be live on eBay UK in the next few weeks.
13 Responses
The program will be limited to eBay Shops subscribers and you’ll also have to be an above standard rated seller. This is not a program where dodgy sellers will be able to buy visibility and indeed if you’re listing doesn’t perform well, even if you bid 20% of the sale price, it won’t be promoted.’
Above standard seller is the lowest level of seller allowed to trade on eBay on an ongoing basis. It can buy exposure over Premium Listings from TRS.
I liked AdCommerce as it allowed promotion of the seller by way of generic terms and link back to an eBay shop. It worked well on the German site for my UK listings.
Sick to death of Ebay continually trying to charge sellers for what they should already be getting.
The whole point of the constant pressurising of sellers in recent years was allegedly to promoted top rated sellers.
Now it seems you’ve got to pay YET again, along with fee hikes, £250 pm shop subscription hike, fvf on postage etc etc.
Do really think we are going to pay again, Ebay, you greedy bunch of b*******s
Hate it, hate it, hate it. Why? Ebay already bleed us dry with fees and by making us jump trough all the hoops to get TRS.
All this will do is encourage the cretins who are happy to make 5p on each sale and have no idea what net and gross are.
Please Ebay, don’t do it.
Try doing something that actually helps sellers for once instead of these idiotic, half cocked grabs for more cash from hard working sellers.
Shame on you.
Black Adder ‘Well that’s it Baldrick, Her Majesty has given me 24 hours to provide an idea that will stop declining revenues, or its of with my head. So its goodbye head.’
23 hours 30 minutes later
Baldrick ‘I’ve got a cunning plan’
Black Adder ‘Go on Baldrick, might as well have one last laugh before my fate is decided’
Baldrick ‘Well. You know how you charge sellers for listing, and charge sellers for shops, and charge sellers final value fees’
Black Adder ‘Yeeees’
Baldrick ‘ Well, why don’t you just charge the sellers again for showing their listings’
Black Adder ‘ That’s the most stupid idea I’ve ever heard, who is going to pay four times to sell their products’
23 hours 59 minutes later
Nursey ‘ I hope you aren’t going to get your dress dirty again, you know how long it took to clean last time’
Queeny ‘Shut up Nursey. Well Black Adder????’
Black Adder ‘ I’ve had a brilliant idea Your Majesty that will solve all of the problems. We are going to charge sellers four times for listing and selling their products’
Write your own ending to this tale.
Previously ebay gave us 50 listings per month as auctions and another 50 as either auction or fixed price. Now they reduced that to 20 and another 20 for only certain collectible categories.
The problem with ebay is that it is run by people without a single moral fiber in their body. It is also run by people who are so deluded by their own self worth they can never fathom they might be wrong (think Dilbert’s boss). They also have no idea about actual selling in the real world because all they are pencil pushing mangers.
eBay sales continue to decline and other sites grow because eBay management is of the same thinking most politicians use – they think they know better and you are just some poor sap you can’t think for themselves. Guess what ebay – you are your slide will continue because you think you can still blackmail people in selling on your site as its the only thing around. Its not – hasn’t been for years.
They reduced the number of free listings per month to try to pressure people into renting a store. Why on earth would I do that? I just wait until you you have one your free listing periods and list items then. If you don’t have a free listing then I’ll move more of my product into the several brick and mortar stores I have them in now. The retail stores may get 30% but they do ALL THE FREAKING WORK – I just drop the items off.
There is no way way you are going to pressure me into pay a worthless store rental fee or paying listing fees ever. When you stop trying to scam your sellers like you scam buyers with your so called free shipping program then you will grow. It just one wonder if ebay has a special brainstorming rooms where they sit around and think how much they can screw their sellers over and then wonder why their their sales are down and people left when the last several years they have done out of their way to get rid of small time seller sin favor of big box sellers from the U.S. who sell mostly chinese products or for sellers who sell direct from china.
So you can now bypass Best match if you pay for it. more guf they can’t even fix the site of the various problems they have. from glitch’s to half hearted implementation of promo manager.
It makes sense if the pool of buyers is indeed getting smaller, they think sellers will pay for higher visibility.
I’ve recently paid for a premium package on another niche marketplace site to get more visibility, but there are no fvf on that site.
I saw a seller say on the boards they’re going to try selling at a loss to get an imprint And then increase the price, (a tactic suggested in an earlier post on tambay to increase visibility)
I feel it’s becoming a bit of a mugs game. If my items ever stop selling all together I’ll leave but I’m not paying any extra to sell my items thsts eBays job to make their fees.
Incidentally sales from physical locations are on the increase.