Promoted Listings Changes - You Must Be Joking, eBay

[superchallenge]

Email from eBay this morning. 

If I read it correctly, from 24th June, if you use promoted listings and ANYBODY clicks on the ad one time...if the item then sells to ANYBODY ELSE within the next 30 days, you get charged as if the first guy bought it.

That means that if Bob in Scotland clicks an ad and doesn't buy, but Steve from Wales rolls in 29 days later and finds the item in search and buys it without clicking on a promoted listings ad, you get charged because Bob clicked it almost a month ago.

It's all well and good saying "You'll still only pay when your items sell" eBay, but that isn't the point. We pay for promoted listings in order to help find A BUYER, not a browser. If somebody comes in and buys an item organically, then the ad hasn't done its job and we're not paying for it.

We'll be removing all of our promoted listings campaigns later today, as this starts in 32 days, which is extremely underhanded. The reason being that there's a 30-day attribution window, so if Steve clicks on one of our ads this Sunday, on June 24th when Bob buys the item without clicking an advert, we'll get charged.

[tub-at-home]

I agree with you apart from your comment on Vinted, I use it and find that I sell much more there than on ebay. Entirely your choice on how much you list for & you don't have to accept offers, no fees & I find the postage options are brilliant. Plus they at least do help the buyer if item is lost in post which ebay refused to do for one of my buyers, despite them paying the now buyer protection & simple delivery.

[valueaddedresource]

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@valueaddedresource wrote:

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dave@ebay wrote:

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@tribalgiftsuk wrote:

I would like to hope that is the case but sadly i think it will be every subsequent sale within the 30 days of the original click. Hope for clarification soon.

Theres a lot of questions that need to be answered about this.

marco@ebay  dave@ebay kate@ebay 

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Hi @tribalgiftsuk 

I spoke to the ads team on this and they confirmed it will not count as a click when you click on your own listings.

Thanks,

Dave

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dave@ebay  the question wasn't about clicking on your own listings. The question was if any person (besides you) clicks on your ad and it is a multi-quantity listing, will all subsequent sales of that item for the next 30 days be assessed the ad fee because of that one click?

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For @tribalgiftsuk and anyone else waiting on a direct response about this from eBay - Dave posted this in response in the chat thread today.

https://community.ebay.co.uk/t5/Chat-with-the-eBay-Community/Weekly-Chat-with-the-eBay-Community-Tea... 

"If a multi quantity item is clicked any sales on the item within the window will incur the fee. So with the example on the other thread, if the item was clicked and the 9 items sold after the initial click, the seller would see the fee on each of the following transactions. "

That chat is closed now so I can't respond there but thanks for following up dave@ebay !

[mysterybundlestcg]

i unfortunately think it has been like this for a long time, but worse still have you seen how promotions work now? target daily budget is a pointless number, i always used to be charged 2x whatever i had planned to spend, and now they are saying it can be 7x or 30x because they go to 2x your daily budget x7days a week, so in one day you could spend 7x your daily budget, but now they are making it monthly..

so if you set your daily ad spend to something like 3 quid they can take up to 90 if they want (if the campaign was a month long)

never had an ad campaign acatually work and charge me what they said. campaign always runs out when the funds run out yet it goes to 2x my budget every day somehow? it will run out when it runs out of money but blink and it will keep going up still

also some clicks can cost 50p lol  imagine paying 50p for any Tom, *bleep* or Harry to click on your listing, that thing we do hundreds of times with no intentions of buying  

[pidgeun1]

Exactly. With the advent of AI, I'm 100% sure that they will have bots click all the promoted listings to burn the seller budget. I'm already hearing spikes in visits from huge number of unsigned users (bot activity). All the sellers should stop promoting. It's no longer worth it. 

[valueaddedresource]

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@valueaddedresource wrote:

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@valueaddedresource wrote:

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dave@ebay wrote:

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@tribalgiftsuk wrote:

I would like to hope that is the case but sadly i think it will be every subsequent sale within the 30 days of the original click. Hope for clarification soon.

Theres a lot of questions that need to be answered about this.

marco@ebay  dave@ebay kate@ebay 

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Hi @tribalgiftsuk 

I spoke to the ads team on this and they confirmed it will not count as a click when you click on your own listings.

Thanks,

Dave

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dave@ebay  the question wasn't about clicking on your own listings. The question was if any person (besides you) clicks on your ad and it is a multi-quantity listing, will all subsequent sales of that item for the next 30 days be assessed the ad fee because of that one click?

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For @tribalgiftsuk and anyone else waiting on a direct response about this from eBay - Dave posted this in response in the chat thread today.

https://community.ebay.co.uk/t5/Chat-with-the-eBay-Community/Weekly-Chat-with-the-eBay-Community-Tea... 

"If a multi quantity item is clicked any sales on the item within the window will incur the fee. So with the example on the other thread, if the item was clicked and the 9 items sold after the initial click, the seller would see the fee on each of the following transactions. "

That chat is closed now so I can't respond there but thanks for following up dave@ebay !

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@iceblue_uk  just tagging you to make sure you see this as well since I know you were looking for an official answer.

[pidgeun1]

dave@ebay can you clarify if clicks from users who are not signed in count for the Ads attribution?

[iceblue_uk]

I honestly thought it was completely unthinkable that ebay would consider charging ad fees on sales that have absolutely NOTHING to do with any promoting that ebay may or may not have done. Now there is little incentive for ebay to find quality sales leads. From reading comments online it seems that independent marketing professionals are in agreement.

Has anyone... ever... even just one time... seen an ebay promotion that gained more sales than clicks? I would doubt it and Ebay must know this, so why the big pretence about complicated click attribution rules?

With these rules I can't see how any item that is promoted in a general campaign could get ever any organic sales, at least not until you turn off the promo. So why don't ebay just come clean and charge a fee on ALL sales of a promoted item, because is that not the obvious intention here?

Perhaps we've been too hasty here... maybe there's some hidden benefit to sellers that has yet to be revealed. Maybe ebay have special plans to improve their general promotion strategies in order to attract much more business for promoters than before. That at least would soften the blow somewhat.

Perhaps Dave@ebay could let us know the reasoning behind this change and what justification, if any, there is for such a move. 

If not and we are expected to start paying 20-25% more in general ad fees for nothing in return, this is certainly not something we will accept.

[iceblue_uk]

Dave@ebay please would you check on one other thing?...

I notice that on the ebay app there's now an icon on every listing photo in search results, to allow users to flick through the images without opening the listing. Does doing that count as a click even if the listing is not opened up?

[padanpcparts]

Which makes no sense at all as the stock market has been on a moon burn since then. 

[athenacraftsltd]

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@bravergrace wrote:

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More to the point, are they going to have any incentive to stop their own staff from doing some extra clicking?  Because some of their staff clearly have targets based on the amount of promoted listing income they generate.

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Come now, Bas. Surely such errant behaviour wouldn't even be permitted - never mind encouraged with targets and bonuses.

You can't seriously be entertaining the notion that a large company might act unethically?

For shame!

[theelench]

Which has been fuelled by QE flooding the markets with cheap money that hasn't fully unravelled yet.  It is still fuelling asset bubbles and the cost of living crisis. 

[superchallenge]

Why does everyone think they'd need to use AI or bots to click on an ad, in order to game their own system?

Bit short on cash this month? Let's run a one-line database command that sets "was_clicked" (or whatever) to "1" on a million ads. That'll do it.

[valueaddedresource]

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@iceblue_uk wrote:

Dave@ebay please would you check on one other thing?...

I notice that on the ebay app there's now an icon on every listing photo in search results, to allow users to flick through the images without opening the listing. Does doing that count as a click even if the listing is not opened up?

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@iceblue_uk  what you are describing is Quick View (also sometimes shown on desktop search as well) and since January 2025, eBay's Marketing Terms have said "a click includes (without limitation) any interaction with your Ad (e.g. add to Watchlist, add to basket, quick view or other interactive functionality)."

So yes, if a buyer interacts with the Quick View but doesn't click through to view the full description, it still counts just like it counts if they tap the little heart icon on the search result to add the item to their Watchlist without clicking through to view the full listing page.

And of course "other interactive functionality" is sufficiently vague enough to cover a wide array of other actions - in fact I suspect that eBay may use that to cover them for attributing ad fees to sales made through social sharing tools as well, as @difficult2find pointed out in post 121 of this thread.

https://community.ebay.co.uk/t5/Business-Seller-Board/Promoted-Listings-Changes-You-Must-Be-Joking-e... 

Bottom line as I said earlier in this thread - it has gotten to where sellers must simply assume every sale for every item they have enrolled in Promoted Listings will be charged the fee and set their pricing and offer negotiation strategies accordingly, with the view that the few rare organic sales will just be a "bonus" at this point.

[iceblue_uk]

Thanks for the info and advice. Unfortunately it is as I thought, this change simply means no more organic sales for sellers and hefty price increases for consumers in order to pay for ebay's shareholder profits. Ebay is already more expensive on most items than other platforms where the buying experience is far superior, who is going to buy from ebay when we are forced to raise prices again to cover this new money grab.

Nah... we're not doing that. We are sick of having to increase prices to cover ebay's increasing appetite for higher fees and we refuse to process orders for which ebay makes double the profit that we make.

There are better options and now it's finally worth the hassle of moving everything over.

[charmkeyrings]

I can't beleive that either. A company will only grow into a multi-national corporation through decency, hard work, morals and ethics. And I'm far too stupid for you to tell me otherwise.

[shalinoth]

Workaround: Highly promote a clone of your actual listings (at a price inflated by the cost of promotion) and put a link in your promoted description to your non-promoted actual listings.

Nobody will buy the promo, so eBay won't get the fee.

But everyone sees your 'Sale' item link and clicks through to the unpromoted items.

To be clear, yes I encourage circumvention of this vile greedy scheme.

I have already stopped selling on eBay over this, but good luck to everyone else.

[jonatjonatjonat]

I think you are VASTLY over estimating the number of people who click through to descriptions.

[therenewalworkshopltd]

Really don't see what the big deal is if your a private seller.

Why on earth would you need to be promoting anyway?  It makes no sense at all.

[shalinoth]

My saying "everyone" was definitely hyperbole.

[valueaddedresource]

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@shalinoth wrote:

Workaround: Highly promote a clone of your actual listings (at a price inflated by the cost of promotion) and put a link in your promoted description to your non-promoted actual listings.

Nobody will buy the promo, so eBay won't get the fee.

But everyone sees your 'Sale' item link and clicks through to the unpromoted items.

To be clear, yes I encourage circumvention of this vile greedy scheme.

I have already stopped selling on eBay over this, but good luck to everyone else.

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@shalinoth  except that Marco has confirmed that links of any kind are no longer allowed in listing descriptions, even if they are links to another eBay listing.

https://community.ebay.co.uk/t5/Seller-Central/Links-In-Listings-Weekly-Chat-Follow-Up/m-p/7860410#M...