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.
I will continue to post progress, I've made a couple of sales today but sales are still over 50% down on the average week and higher on the month since I cancelled PL's.
@therenewalworkshopltd wrote:Or to put it another way, sellers have been complacent and allowed promotions to continue.
The problem is, is that so many simply believe that there is no alternative. So even knowing that it's going to cost them more, will continue to use promotions.
And if it has not been rolled back in Germany, then the vast majority of those using them, have continued to do so.
Bear in mind that just because you see all the complaints on the forum, that does not mean that the vast majority of sellers will do anything other than continue as usual..
It's never representative of the entire community, just a fraction of it and at that, usually the ones who have negative things to say. Simply because the others are just getting on with it.
@therenewalworkshopltd it will be interesting to see how this plays out as it expands and you make a great point about the community forums not necessarily being a representative sample of sellers.
Germany is a fairly small market and they only launched the new attribution model there on February 26th, which means it was only active for ~ 1/3 of the first quarter so we have yet to actually have a full financial report that really reflects whether eBay is actually making more in ad fees from this or whether it has caused sellers to stop using ads/lower their ad rate percentages.
What we do know is that first party ads (all of the various seller paid Promoted Listing ad products including cost per sale, cost per click, store display ads, and offsite ads) contributed $418M in revenue in Q1.
That represented 14% year over year growth but notably was down from $434M in Q4.
It's possible that could simply represent sellers lowering ad spend after the holiday rush, but we don't see that same trend happening from Q4 2023 ($368M) to Q1 2024 ($370M) in this same chart, or it could be sellers pulled back in Q1 due to larger concerns about tariffs, macro economic environment etc.
But it's also possible that sellers may be starting to hit a wall and slowing adoption of Promoted Listings or lowering the percent they are willing to pay, in reaction to changes eBay made to ratchet up General Dynamic and Priority cost per click minimums in Q4 and/or these attribution changes that hit Germany in the last month of Q1.
The Q2 report may give us a clearer picture of how those changes in Germany have affected overall ad revenue, though it will still be a bit of a guessing game because eBay doesn't break it out by region.
Either way, I wouldn't assume the only possible reason eBay is pushing forward with this in other markets is that they are seeing fantastic results in Germany with little seller pushback...there's also the possibility that it is a move being made out of desperation because management is out of other ideas and throwing things against the wall hoping something will stick.
@simplyessential_uk wrote:Im afraid I cant post anything over 90days old to show you mine, but it mirrored what you are experiencing now a complete drop off the cliff when I switched off the PLs - It now looks like this but you can see the green underneath showing up on prev 90 days (up 33% from prev 90 days) - As mentioned try using that 10% buffer and reduce your prices
Thanks for this, actually I am aware that I could do some work on my listings to make them better as well. I don't see the point in discounting my products by 10% though, my products sell well enough at the price they're at when people can see them, if I drop my pricing I'm going to simply devalue the difference between my products and other peoples and I'm not interested in race to the bottom with some of the sellers who are on here. If i'm going to lose 10% I may as well just stick PL back on! My work on improving my listings has been diverted away for the need to get my website up and running to make up for loss of sales here.
What people like me want and need is a stable platform to be able to generate business for themselves and that's not what's being provided right now which makes me nervous. That said, this is still a sideline for me and I am relatively inexperienced in the world of online sales although I had toyed with the idea of making it more than a sideline. Having run my own business for over 10 years in the IT sector these about face changes remind me of Google and their propensity to pull the rug out from under you when they decide the product they released and everyone started relying on isn't making them enough money and they just shut it down or water it's features down and hide the rest behind a paywall.
