eBay have enhanced their promoted listings to make them more prominent and give users more information so that they can make informed decisions on how much to bid.
eBay Promoted Listings are a way to get more eyeballs on your listings, but comes at a cost – you select an additional percentage of the final value as your bid to have your listing promoted, which you then pay if your listing sells in addition to the normal final value fees.
3 enhancements to eBay Promoted Listings
1) Higher Position in search
Promoted listings now appear higher on the search results page, where they’ve got a greater chance of catching buyers’ attention. This should mean more clicks and more sales.
2) Promote More of your Listings
eBay have increased the number of listings you can promote from 30% to a new allowance of 50% of your eligible listings or 500 listings, whichever is greater.
3) See what your Competitors are Bidding
When promoted listings was new there was little competition. Are the bids you set then still competitive now? eBay will let you know with new updated information about how much other sellers are bidding by category.
eBay have made available historical data by category detailing average bids sellers have placed to promote their listings. The figures are based on data collected by eBay UK up to the 29th April 2016 so it’s bank up to date. You can download the information in a pdf file.
Should you use eBay Promoted Listings?
It’s easy to think that you’re already paying fees so why should you pay them a second time with Promoted Listings? The answer is simple, if after paying the promoted listings fees you make £1 or more than if you didn’t use Promoted Listings then it’s a worthwhile exercise. It’s all about money at the end of the day.
If your product is already performing well in Best Match on eBay then Promoted Listings might not be appropriate. However it’s still worth experimenting to see if Promoted Listings increases your sales further.
If you’re launching a brand new product on eBay then Promoted Listings may be just the ticket to give sales a bump start until you gain a good position in Best Match.
Are advice is to test with a small group of products, monitor results, adjust your bid prices and test again. You’ve nothing to lose as you’ll only pay if someone clicks on your advert and then buys in the next 30 days. If they don’t click or if they click and don’t buy it won’t cost you a penny.
5 Responses
We pay Shop fees and listing fees and jump through all the hoops to list and get to the top of best match and then eBay decides the only way to get our listings seen is to pay a second time for the privilege
Remind me again why we should have to pay a second time just so buyers can see our listings when we have already paid once?.
So IF I were to pay ebay more money to ‘promote’ my listing, and my competitors then all decide to do the same, could someone explain to me how my competitors and myself will be better off?
What anoys me most, is there are so many issues with the entire ebay system, from dead links, out of date pages, bugs, counterfeit goods, cheap items being sold from China but which appear to be from the UK whilst paying no VAT, and an entire sales system which seems to be totally and wholly in favour of the con-artist buyers and treats each and every seller with utter contempt yet somehow they can spend large amounts of time coming up with yet more money-making nonsense like this. Although I actually earn money from ebay, frankly I cannot wait for the entire company to collapse, hopefully once the monopoly is broken we’ll have a decent trading platform.
What improvements? Our impressions dropped to big fat zero when the said improvements were implemented.
I literally can’t wait for that pathetic business to go the way of dodo.