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.

[simplyessential_uk]

Think you need to read back through the thread as there are lots of info on what ppl are chosing to do -  but be prepared to see a drop in sales (dramatically) if you stop PL - It lasts for about a month but you have to decide whats best from your business as some categories are more competative than others or have larger profit margins that they can sustain the increase.

[simplyessential_uk]

You have writting exact same experience to mine - I was in the 1% club (then 2%) and found 1% enough to "enroll" my listings into Page 1 as Im not in a competative category. Since the 2% rule came in my sales started to decrease and initially put it down to ppl just falling for the 5-10% "suggested" percentage but, like you, experimented with more (upto 5%) and saw no benefit to justify the extra, my margins are not that generous to start with. I removed PLs completely (eventhough it only accounted to something like £20-30 a month extra) and stuck with it, I noticed EVERY sale seemed to be via promotions and felt that was just to "convenient" to be true, with no evidence to the contrary.  Initially sales just fell off a cliff but after about 4wks the organic impressions gradually replaced the PLs to be back to the same levels - The fact my impressions have recovered organically, reinforces my theory that Ebay are taking money for nothing, I feel likes its now a tax or a payment "not" to be hidden from view.   Im quiet at the moment, but thats normal for me once summer hols hit and I dont pick up til October so I know this isnt ebay but my general sales pattern Im now glad I came out earlier as this new "across listings" money grab is a license to just add more FVF on so the 12% is suddenly 15-20+% per sale and thats alot of commission to pay.   You may be finding the Promo fee on some of your listings applied for the next 30days because any listing viewed can incurr the promo fee upto 30 days after it was viewed.

[brindsey]

Shop on holiday settings -  For a few days I'm cat sitting for my son down in Newbury (Lovely part of the country).  Back up and running on Monday.

[technthread]

It is concerning to read sellers saying the PL is being applied the day after the sale.

Leaving aside the eBay money grab, some of us smaller sellers record our sales manually each day rather than use software so it may screw up our book keeping. 

[sheba-knows-best]

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@technthread wrote:

It is concerning to read sellers saying the PL is being applied the day after the sale.

Leaving aside the eBay money grab, some of us smaller sellers record our sales manually each day rather than use software so it may screw up our book keeping. 

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I'm a small seller and apply my PL manually.

I wait for a full week.

Then at the end of week 26, say, go back to week 25 and apply the PL costs for that week (found in advertising dashboard) as a single cost on the whole week.

It works for me. But I had 85% of sales on PL even before this change so was happy to average the cost on them all.

[madfroguk]

Now they quietly sneaking even more "improvements", a week ago the lowest you could go on the general promotions was 3%, now is minimum 5% to promote, which with previous attribution model was about 17-18%, so let's say before 24th you were promoting at 12% level, to get the same total fees you will have to go around 3-3.5%, but you can't because new minimum is 5%. 

[valueaddedresource]

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@madfroguk wrote:

Now they quietly sneaking even more "improvements", a week ago the lowest you could go on the general promotions was 3%, now is minimum 5% to promote, which with previous attribution model was about 17-18%, so let's say before 24th you were promoting at 12% level, to get the same total fees you will have to go around 3-3.5%, but you can't because new minimum is 5%. 

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@madfroguk  I believe you're talking about the minimum rate cap for Promoted Listings General Dynamic - in which case, that change to move it from 2% to 5% happened back in November 2024.

https://community.ebay.com/t5/Selling/Promoted-Listings-Dynamic-Rate-Minimum-Now-5-Check-Your-Genera...

As far as I know, Promoted Listings General Fixed Rate can still be set at a minimum of 2%....but if that has changed too, I would definitely be interested in that!

[nutrafituk]

It is still 2% here, not sure though if this is maybe category related? Anyway, just had a look at our numbers again and that is simply nothing but a daylight robbery. So we have less views, less clicks and less purchases however our promoted listing cost have shot up by almost 70% just since the policy change. And all of that despite proactively reducing the number of listing we promote at all, and sticking to 2% only if applied.

Without being melodramatic here I just hope eBay will get sooner or later what they deserve. It seems that have it coming their way at pace. In the meantime we are expanding elsewhere and will definitely not look back after all that mess and greed.

[iceblue_uk]

Operating successfully on ebay used to be all about gaining position in search results by reliably providing good quality products and excellent customer service, but now it seems to be about little else but who can afford the pay the highest ad fees, a system that has the unfortunate potential to be used (abused?) to drive out smaller competition. It could be why some of the biggest sellers on here have some of the worst feedback.

Even if everyone were to simply drop their ad percentages in order to offset the loss in organic sales, that new average % will likely continue to rise, as it has done over the last 8 years. The average bid back then was 3-6% and 20% would have been considered to be a completely unacceptable extra cost, I still do considering all the other fees, plus the fact that the ad % is charged on everything including postage and foreign sales tax, not just the sales price.

[kickin.assets]

@sheba-knows-best 

Do not think you are safe by waiting a week to see if a sale has PL fees. On June 6th in the US sellers woke up to eBay taking PL fees out for sales that seemingly were sold organically MONTHS before. Some sellers had fees taken out as far back as January of this year! I had several PL charges myself from April/May sales that were sold as ORGANIC! Now eBay says those were PL. No. No they were not. Sellers also that day were getting double charged for PL fees!

How did ebay respond to this?

eBay eventually addressed this saying it was some “glitch” that they had found in March where sellers were not being charged for some PL listings. MARCH! Did they address this issue in March? No. Did they ever even give a heads up about some “glitch”? No. Did they just one morning in June decide to take millions from sellers with absolutely no notice? Yes! Did they also at the same time, “conveniently” and “quietly” re-word some of the terms of service so people could not dispute this? Yes.

After all this chaos all eBay had to say was; sorry not sorry and nothing has been done/said since. They quite literally stole millions from people that day.

I’ve never been one that was for or against promotions, believing sellers should do what works for them. I still believe this. What is concerning though is the sheer lack of transparency and down right shady behavior. This isn’t acceptable. 

A week after all this chaos, I quit ALL promotions. Done and done.

Kiks

[bellconnor9000]

I had found about a month ago my listings were not getting many views. I started PLs at 2% and got a reasonable increase in views and sales. Over the last week I’ve gradually increased it to 5% hoping for even better views but they stayed the same. So today I went back to 2% and not a single viewing on PLs ! I’ve switched it off all together for now. Any thoughts or advice welcome.

[therenewalworkshopltd]

Do you never end/relist your items?

You have some there that go back some time, which in turn means that your listings visibility will be suffering because of it.

You shouldn't have anything that is older than 3 months, unless they have multiple regular sales on them.

So simply ending/sell similar for the older items, should help bump up your visibility/sales.

[bellconnor9000]

No I never relist, I often sell items that are 6 months or more old. Will look at it for sure

[therenewalworkshopltd]

Ebay have said this directly.  Look at the last Ebay open Videos.  They go into detail as to how you should list things etc.  Well worth a look.

The longer you have listings active above three months old, the less viewability all of your listings have.

They basically drag them down.

That doesn't of course mean that you won't sell any, but you are far less likely to do so.

[iceblue_uk]

Good advice apparently, but it really shouldn't be. Listings are supposed to be 'Good Til Cancelled' and they always were, until recently we never had to relist anything. I think this just indicates another part of the site that's broken. So broken that we are officially advised to relist everything manually as a permanent workaround.

Its getting very hard these days to find anything positive to say about ebay. The last useful update I can remember is their promise to make customer invoices downloadable by the buyer, but months on we are still being asked for invoices so I presume that's not happened? 

[therenewalworkshopltd]

The invoice thing has happened, but you do need to sign up to it! 
It may not yet be open to everyone, but not sure without checking.  I know that I signed up for it and have not been asked for an invoice in quite some time now.

But to be honest, for the relisting, it's something that I have done for as long as I can remember.
Not sure when/if it actually changed tbh.

[iceblue_uk]

Up until around 2023 we had listings that were over 8 years old, yet continually near or at the top of search and also out-selling all others in the category. Only after that time did we see many of these long-term high-performing listings start to fall of the cliff, for no apparent reason.

On the other subject, why the hell would we have to sign up for our buyers to have a downloadable invoice? Is this not something which most, if not all, other platforms provide as standard?

For goodness sake ebay come on... your platform has run for decades yet something so simple and necessary as a downloadable customer invoice still has to be manually requested by ebay message, or signed up to by invitation, which we have not received despite being a top-rated member for over 20 YEARS!!!