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.

[oceanartsnorthdevon]

I have more or less switched off all PL's over the past month, as expected everything died a death apart from the odd low cost item and auction items.  Quite unexpectedly on the 18/7/25 my external views shot up to 1188 and I don't  partake in any other promotions including offside?  As a result in this spike I sold several items that day after days of nothing, on the 19/7/25 it dropped to 776 views and I sold a couple of items that day and then the next and now back to nothing and external views have gone back to normal.  Not sure what that was all about?  I had been on to customer service prior about decline in sales, whether they had a hand in it or something else was happening, not quite sure as they told me to come back to them if nothing had changed and they would pass my account to be looked at.  Interestingly on that same day with the spike I also had a good sale on another platform that I sell on? Did anyone else experience this last weekend?

It just goes to show it is not seasonal, competition is not a factor and my items are still saleable, the usual response when questioning why sales are down but quite apparent they are not getting seen as sales were abundant for two days with that small window of peak external views.

[pillarboxred]

Lawmakers need to look at how web platforms are almost sovereign states who can do what they like, including charging users for the fact that sites must comply with national and international laws. It's getting beyond a joke.

[pillarboxred]

Yes. I think you've got it.

[pegr-834437]

I see you suffered the same, do you do any PL now? How long ago did you stop and what are sales like now?

Its the fact that even though eBays own data is showing a huge drop they are saying there is no drop, so either the data eBay give is incorrect, then how can we trust they are taking funds correctly or they are just lying to customers when they claim to have looked into accounts.

[nutrafituk]

So what we did was from the very first day they announced it we started removing 5 listing from our campaign. It was a no braine that all would have collapsed it unplugged in one go. No surprise we started losing views and traffic however most of it was just ebay's computing rather than real sales gone. Obviously the more we removed the higher loss was occurring. At the same timeafter 4-5 weeks in some started picking up gradually, and now we are about 30% behing previous sales however paying peanuts extra. The hope is that will only improve while carrying on with the rest of campaign totally gone soon. Interestingly, ebay kept on playing with visibilty - trying to squeeze as much as possible.

Mind you please that it can be product or category specific and have a different impact - no suggestion here there is a solution. Go through the whole Performance section and compare what it has been like at your end. There is enough information to play with and draw some conclusions.

[vintagechinashop]

The same here. I turned off all promotions and won’t be turning them back on. I’ve made my first loss this month but that could be attributed to July being my worst month traditionally and also that I had my holiday settings on. All that said in 83% down on this time last year but on other platforms things are going along nicely and I’m not paying fees on most of my sales as I’m using marketplace and v****d so I’m happy to continue with that 

I’ve almost forgotten what it’s like to hear the ca ching on eBay. I’ve just done two parcels which were my total weeks sales. I’m a very stubborn lady. I refuse to play games so I’m sorry eBay you certainly won’t be getting any extra income from me and that’s down to your pathetic rule change  

my Nan a good northern strong determined woman used to say. “ go swim in the canal till your hat floats” I learnt from the best. God Bless you Nan 

[stoney-racing]

We've had promoted listings off for most of our larger items for a month now, we experimented with a minimum 2% ad fee for a week on one shop, but it did nothing, the listings were getting barely any promoted views at 2% ad rate.

Maybe we're lucky that many of our larger items are low competition, but we've had a 45% drop across the board in ad views, ad sales and ad fees, but no drop in overall sales, July is slightly up on June. If anything I think eBay have done us a favour in showing us that the advertising we paid for previously was worthless.

When I search for some of our items with specific targeted keywords, the "competition" from the top 4-5 promoted search results are unrelated items that a buyer is never going to buy, so all eBay is doing is showing useless stuff above our organic listings, and we are generally the top of the organic listings so ours is the first useful item they see.

We do still use promoted listings for our low priced high volume stuff that has high competition, as that would drop off a cliff without promotions, but we have dropped the ad rate on those (before it was typically 9%+, now 5-7%) and now just price it in as an additional fee, so we've increased our prices slightly to include the ad fees. Again ad views, sales and fees on these items are down about 27% overall, but our total sales is still the same.

In total we are paying about 40% less ad fees and sales are the same, so eBay's greed and incompetence has perhaps done us a favour for once.

Once we've got several months of stable data to compare to, I'm going to try lowering / removing promoted listings from our high competition items on one shop, to see what difference it makes. Overall aim is to reduce / remove as much in ad fees as possible without harming sales too much.

[pidgeun1]

Promotions are a race to the bottom. eBay uses Fear of missing out (FOMO) to get the sellers use promotions for their items. Sellers shouldn't panic and shouldn't fall for this eBay money grab trap

[mash9701]

Just sold a camera lens for £80 got stung for about 8 quid, didn't even remember promoting it to be honest as I don't like the percentage eBay take.

[vintagechinashop]

I stopped promoting and sales and views fell off a cliff. Looks like I’m slowly climbing back up as my views are up and I had a sale yesterday. It’s always quiet for me in the summer but I’m hopeful that things can only get better 

[thedriftwoodshack]

Same happened here

I call it fraud or legalised robbery 

I'll be fighting them!

[therenewalworkshopltd]

Fraud, really?  When they have told you what they are doing, how exactly is that fraudulent?

Legalised robbery, I would agree with.
But how exactly are you going to be fighting them?

You can turn off your listings, but that isn't fighting them.

[pegr-834437]

It possibly could be fraud if the figures they are giving its customers are incorrect, we have all seen that if you stop paying your organic figures drop off a cliff too, so they are either hiding them or they were incorrect in the first place. If they were incorrect then how do we know what we have been paying for has been correct? As mentioned earlier I know an account that saw a 80%+ decrease in organic impressions, the answer from eBay was nothing has changed. Something clearly had changed but they refuse to give data to back up their response.

[lord_and_lady_m]

Competition and markets authority as it's affecting small businesses unfairly, and advertising standards as its misleading potential customers perhaps. If one person has clicked and turns it endlessly into a promoted listings you may lose business as some people may know to avoid all sponsored listings, so would never see yours. 

[reachelectronics]

Has anyone noticed that it is impossible to control advertising and that it doesn't match what the dashboard says?

Since this implementation at eBay I have done nothing different and I seem to be paying 20% more than before yet I have Dynamic Rates with a CAP in place to stop it going over what I can afford.

I have brought this up with eBay and they say nothing is wrong or just argue with me telling me that "no one is forcing me to advertise with them".

I don't know what's going on but it has been like if for 5 weeks now and I am just on the verge of giving up on eBay.

Is anyone else seeing the same thing?
My Advertising Dashboard doesn't match the ROAS/ACOS to that which is shown on the Overview/Performance pages on Seller Homepage, it is as if they are taking double what they should??

Plus, I have had ZERO Organic sales now - I can't even find one!

Whatever is going on needs rectifying fast and no-one at eBay seems to care.

[darth_baggins]

The whole point of this thread is to point out the new rule - that if ANYONE clicks on a promoted listing, then ANYONE else buys it, you get charged.

This is likely why you are seeing higher fees and no organic sales.

[custom-giftsuk]

You are correct, no one at eBay does care. Well not about sellers, unless it's how much cash can be extracted from your pockets.

CS has been reduced to an dodgy AI that pretty much says "no" to everything and CS that just follow a script now and aren't interested in whatever is being said. 

However, eBay are not alone in this. Every other ecommerce site of whatever flavour - be it e*sy, a***zon, ti**ok, etc are of the same ilk now. Increase prices and reduce services. Pretty much like any company now - look at Royal Mail for example.

Yet sellers have to go above & beyond 110% of the time, irrespective.

[guymafo]

@custom-giftsuk continued ens***ification. 
GM

[custom-giftsuk]

I absolutely agree 🙂 however I think it's "doing more with less" is a polite way and we all know what that means

[wootton-industries]

I agree with your comments 100%