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.

[difficult2find]

So I dont know if anyone else noticed another change recently along a similar vein? I quite often get approached to make custom products and I do so by adding a custom product on ebay which by default inherits my promotion.

So the other day I listed one, used the share listing link that comes up when you list and noticed they had changed the link from an ebay.co.uk to an ebay.us short link. I pasted it in the chat, the guy bought it and I got charged the promotion fee on the sale. I called ebay to query and they said that is normal behaviour and any sharing link you use now will attract the fee. The only way round it is to go to your listing and copy and paste from the url bar. That can't be tracked...

[crg_music]

I think the plan is more to get people putting prices up ie promote at 10% and add 10% to the price. I personally dont mind that as ebay prices for music in particular are probably lower than discogs for the first time ever so could do with prices going up but this is not really the way. More buyers seems more sustainable.

Personally I promote everything at 10% anyway and just dont price as the cheapest(to start anyway) and most items sell as promoted so I take it as an expense but this does seem iffy to me, effectively saying promote or dont sell. If you are selling mostly obscure stuff you dont really need to anyway and if you are selling very common stuff you might as well just promote and put the price up.

I'd love to make a stand but for the above reason this isn't the fight for me and if competition want to remove promotion I wont be trying to stop them.

[goodibags]

"if you are selling very common stuff you might as well just promote and put the price up."

OR skip the promoting and avoid raising your prices in order to pay for it?

The issue here seems to be that a promoted item can be bought outside of the promotion but if ANYONE had previously clicked on your ad, even just to 'sell similar,' then you'll end up paying the fee. You may see this as Ebay guaranteeing higher prices for all, but why are higher prices considered a good thing?

[vintage-emporium-jedburgh]

This latest  squeeze Of the lemon is just simply  underhanded, 

 Before  though you knew you were being rinsed ,at least you had consolation ,

 your buyer had actually noticed the promotion and purchased, 

to justify your lemming behaviour 

[wholesalepaper]

Very short-sighted decision from ebay. They will get a few more egs, but kill the chicken in the process...

[gardenhomeuk]

Promotions all ended, let's see what happens. TTS leading the way for us at the moment. 

[vintagechinashop]

Not only have I turned mine off but I have downgraded my shop after 11 years. I’m sick of all this money grabbing by eBay constantly punishing business sellers for abiding by HMRC rules and trying to make money  where some people clearly trading as a business are allowed to keep making money for free. I’ve sold more this month on another platform.  My sales this month on here are at an all time low and I’ve had enough 

sorry do I sound bitter. Yes I am because after years of working harder for eBay instead of myself it’s just getting stupid this is just another nail in the coffin for me 

[theelench]

---

@goodibags wrote:

You definitely have to compete IF you want to sell. Like I said, there's no point wasting your time listing stuff if you didn't.

Unless there is NO competition, of course. If your items are very rare you may just get away with charging whatever you want.

---

As a private seller, selling off my vintage glass collection, I would add that ebay recommends that I promote every item I list, including items that are rare.  I refuse to Promote one-off items so I'm sure that the visibility of my items is restricted.

I have one item for sale (probably my last), ebay is suggesting I should promote it at 11% .  It is possibly  very rare but even with restricted visibility still has 6 Watchers,  IMO they are the exact same 6 Watchers who watched virtually everything I listed last year and this.

Although promoting is about selling re-sellers don't like private sellers using it.  They prefer private sellers unsure of the value of their item to take ebays advice and start auctions at 99p, as ebay suggested I do on every auction I listed.

What the re-sellers do NOT want is private sellers promoting their listings and getting anything like un-restricted visibility.  My six Watchers would then have to compete with a lot more private buyers with a genuine interest in the item, instead of waiting and hoping I get desperate enough to send them lower offers, safe in the knowledge that no-one else will see it.

Even if the item is the only one on ebay it's unlikely to sell without promotion, if it does it will take months.  It happened to me last year, a rare Walther bowl, only one on ebay over several months.  Eventually it did sell at full price (a modest £15) probably to one of the Watchers couldn't resist any longer.  Either that or ebay had a glitch and revealed it to a wider audience of enthusiasts, one of whom snatched it on first viewing.  Which is what would have happened if ebay hadn't buried it to try to squeeze PL fees out of me. 

[vintage-emporium-jedburgh]

My slice of Ebays cake used to be full of cream with a cherry on the top

todays slice is out of date and stale

[goodibags]

I always imagined that if an item was rare you'd have to wait for someone to be specifically looking for it, which can take months or years. Tho' with collectables it's possible to get impulse buys too.

Some people swear by promotions and others seem to get by fine without them. I tend to ignore them and manage to scroll (I think) past promoted listings, so maybe that explains why I'm hardly ever asked to promote my own items.

I do seem to have a lot of watchers on my toy cars, far more than might normally lead to a sale. Maybe they're transfixed by the prices reducing every 5 days? They can't all be sellers waiting for the listings to be pulled?

[therenewalworkshopltd]

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.

I think in that particular instance, they have no choice but to monitor it.  

That is effectively fraud and though they may as a company skirt the rules, they don't generally break them.

[therenewalworkshopltd]

No, I didn't think that you made it up at all.

I was merely pointing out the fact, that in any other company providing customer service, that is a sackable offence!

I know this, from spending several years in the industry.

So I ask you once again.  If you had someone representing you to a customer, would you be happy about them calling you a money grabber, or worse?

That is exactly what the representative is doing.

Yes, support fields our complaints.  They don't have to agree with them, but they can forward them on to the relevant dept.    And by empathising with someone, it is not the same as being patronising.  

[bojangled]

@therenewalworkshopltd as much as I agree with you on the unprofessionalism by that agent on that call, we all know that eBay CS is pretty pants anyway.

From advising business sellers to open private accounts, be VAT registered way under the threshold to promising call backs.

Could be that agent had just had a gutful, could be their last day, maybe they just didn’t give a flying fig anymore? Or just a severe case of saying whatever the caller wanted to hear to appease them.

Jo

[jlovie]

If I view one of my own listings it doesn't count as a page view, but will it count for for promotion?

[crg_music]

In general higher prices are not a good thing but its in no businesses best interest for the items they sell to become worthless and I know vinyl records often sell for way less than market value here which helps nobody as next time someone wants to sell the item they will be listing it for less. I do see some listings where they are just killing an item completely. This tends to be more in cd resellers(listing £10 items for £3.50 free shipping)

To be clear I'm not saying I agree with what ebay are doing on a moral level, totally opposite ive just accepted the promoted cut as an additional fee required as part of selling here in 2025 and considered it as another cost of selling. 

I guess my logic has been expect the sale to be promoted anyway = Expect the worse

[ett1954]

A very valid question.  I often review my own listings.

dave@ebay , kat@ebay , marco@ebay   Can someone please confirm or not whether this is the case.

[pj_bb1]

If you want to wean yourself out of PL, you need to do it slowly. Don't jump your head first. What you see on this graph is a standard answer by ebay's algorithm.  You've switched off, we'll force you to come back.

Make a plan for 90 days, and slowly remove yourself from it. Go there every day, end and sell similar few items (depending on your shop size, I would say max 3-4% active listings), taking down the PL while relisting them in bulk.

I pretty much guarantee you, that you'll never see this kind of graph again. The key is not to trigger the algorithm to act. Search youtube for 'how to wean yourself from promoted listings'. My video should be somewhere in the top5.

[therenewalworkshopltd]

Your possibly quite right.

But all I did was make a comment in the first place, that the agent would likely lose their job if it was passed on to management, as per the original post that I responded to.

To be told that I was completely wrong, and that it's fine for an agent to disparage the company.

[iceblue_uk]

Standard promo ebay recommended percentages are now in the TWENTIES, this is a RIDICULOUS level already and if we don't promote near to that level then we simply don't get sales. With this new rule, organic sales will be a thing of the past so they may as well be honest, SCRAP the standard promo altogether and start charging us 35% selling fees, because that's what we'll be paying if we use it. Pay per click simply is not an option for low price items, it's impossible to make a profit now that conversion rates have inexplicably dropped from 50% to 20%. Margins were bad enough already with a standard promo/organic ad combo, if this change goes through we would have to increase prices by 30% just to make a tiny profit. This is the very last straw.

[roberpalme_236]

Without looking back through the messages I believe that the CS agent being referred to was unaware of the  new promoted listings money grab policy until they took the call from the seller in question.

You'd expect an organised well run  multi-national company to brief it's staff on policy changes and coach them on potential issues arising from what was sure to be such a contentious change.

But this is eBay we are talking about............