From next month, eBay’s 100s of Anchor store subscribers and thousands of featured store owners will get a voucher to spend on eBay listing enhancements. Many will choose, instead of splurging the cash on subtitles and scheduled listings, to spend their vouchers on eBay Promoted Listings.
What’s the most effective strategy with eBay Promoted Listings? I spoke to Lorna Beament at GS1, but previously she was at the retailer Dune, running their marketplace business where she used eBay Promoted Listings and knows how to make them work.
One of the surprising things Lorna revealed was what percentage of your sale price you need to give away in order for promoted listings to be successful. It’s smaller than you think – whilst if you want you can give away anything up to 20% of your sale price, just 1% can be highly effective. In the shoe category where Dune trade, the average promoted listings bid according to eBay is over 7% of the sale price but Lorna reveals that 1% works.
Giving away a low percentage might mean that your listing isn’t the one chosen to be promoted all of the time – if someone else has a higher bid price then it’s likely that their listing will be the one that’s seen. The lower the percentage, the higher the profits, and the further your voucher will go. If you stick to 1%, then you can sell £1000 of goods with a £10 eBay Featured shop voucher or £2000 with a £20 Anchor shop voucher so you’ll soon find what works for you. If you’re not managing to spend your entire voucher each month, tweak your percentage rates up until you find the level that works for you.
Lorna also pointed out that you don’t have to promote every listing. You can choose the listings you wish to promote and can even run different percentages for different products. If you have a line which is highly profitable then you may choose to give away more margin in exchange for visibility. This would also work for new lines to build up recent sales until Best Match takes your listing to the top anyway.
Lorna also reminded seller that it’s essential to have product identifiers on your listings. eBay demand them, but also Google won’t accept a product feed from eBay without them so if they’re missing you’re possibly losing out on traffic.
Whether it’s free traffic that eBay generates from Google, or paid for traffic from Promoted Listings, it’s worth spending the extra time to generate additional sales that don’t touch eBay search. If a buyer lands on your product and purchases, it’s a sale without a search view on eBay and recent sales compared to search views is how eBay judge the popularity of your listing and how high in Best Match they’ll place it.
Don’t forget, Lorna highlighted, you’ll only pay for eBay Promoted Listings when you get a sale. There is no charge for clicks so your £10 or £20 a month voucher should start generating you as much as an extra £1000 or £2000 in sales per month based on a 1% bid rate. If it’s doesn’t, tweak your campaigns until you are spending your entire voucher to get maximum exposure for the free money.
(OK, before anyone points out, it’s not really free as shop fees are going up, but seeing as you’re paying for it you might as well use it!)
2 Responses
Great article.
Do you suffer from low DSR scores & defects from impossible delivery targets? Slipping out of search results? Well forget that old fashioned “TRS status”. Just give us a shed load of money to be placed higher than anyone else until someone pays us more than you! The revenue is endless! Did someone mention Inland Revenue I hear you say? Ha-ha! we can’t hear you over the sound of cash at eBay Towers! WARNING: Strict goalpost moves may apply.