Promotion campaign changes from 80% organic sells to 0%

[emkey_90]

i everyone,

I've been selling small goods on eBay for over two years now, and over time I’ve developed a good understanding of how things work. Typically, I sell 15+ items a day, with at least 50% of those being organic sales — no issues until recently.

Something changed drastically around June 23rd. Since then, I’ve had only 1–2 organic sales total — which is extremely unusual for my store. This has never happened before.

I run only general promotions and currently have 5 campaigns active, with the highest ad rate being just 9%. I’ll upload some graphs to help illustrate what’s been happening.

I haven’t noticed any real increase in overall sales to make up for the drop in organic ones. Now, every single order is charged with a promoted fee, which makes things even more confusing — and apparently confusing to eBay customer service as well. I’ve contacted them three times now and haven’t received any clear answers.

Has anyone else experienced something similar?

[nutrafituk]

Our ratio has gone down from 50/50 to 80/20 now and that's all despite not promoting every single listing and removing more daily from our campaign. 

The only thing that makes sense in your case is that you must have had every listing promoted. That would automatically consider every click now as promoted rather than organic.

Good luck with getting any answers from ebay as 'the person is out of office' or 'everything works as intended' is what you can get if any.

[therenewalworkshopltd]

You really haven't been paying attention to the news have you?

Go read this thread.

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

There has been a major change to the way that ebay charges for promotions.

[darth_baggins]

Hardly surprising that eBay 'CS' are confused about an announced change that's been heavily discussed on here already.

[emkey_90]

Thanks — I had a read through it this morning.

For me, the most crucial issue is that my fees have gone up by around 200%. I understand what's happening now, but honestly, it still doesn’t make much sense. At this point, the cost of a general promoted listing campaign feels almost like running an advanced campaign. Now I know how a milk cow must feel.

I accept that I missed the initial change, but what’s really disappointing is that I contacted customer service three times, and not once did anyone explain this to me.

I’ll be pausing my campaigns for now.

[lord_and_lady_m]

It really is disgusting. Essentially any organic traction you may have had will be gone if it's not promoted. Then second someone clicks on the an ads, means all sales for the next 30 days are promoted. So no chance of anything organic. 

I stopped promoting everything. I've always had fairly ok organic traffic. But that has totally been wiped out now. 

You have to pay now to be seen, despite already paying to sell on ebay. Them that can afford to splash the cash on ads, will get the sales. Anyone starting out that hasn't the money to invest on advertising will possibly never get seen. 

And clearly ebay didn't like us with organic traction.

[therenewalworkshopltd]

You know, you really don't have to pay to be seen at all.

I don't advertise, yet still sell.

And as has been noticed by multiple people, if you drop the adverts, you do lose views initially, but they come back in about 3-4 weeks as organic.

Advertising has been pushed by Ebay so much, it seems like everyone now thinks that the only to sell is to use it.  That's never been the way the advertising works.

There are times when it's useful, such as when introducing a new product etc.  But permanent 24/7 advertising, I don't think so!

[tribalgiftsuk]

I took all my promo's off in the run up to the 24th. Ive had a small dip in sales and obviously a larger dip in page impressions. But i am still selling and my actual page views have increased. I have also sold items which haven't sold for ages. 

I think you have to grin and bear it a bit and it levels out after a few weeks as others have said too. Once a month has passed i will be able to see what percentage change i have, i dont think it is going to be much different from month before tbh and no promo fees.

[padanpcparts]

Working as intended by the looks of it. There has been a LOT of discussion regards this on the forums recently. Effectively if you promote anything, there will no longer be any organic sales. That might not be what it says but in practice that is what will happen now. 

[emkey_90]

I’d rather offer a 5% discount directly to customers from time to time to keep them happy, rather than giving 5–15% to eBay for advertising.

I was shocked to see my organic sales drop from an easy 50–80% down to almost 0%. Like many other sellers, I’m probably getting more views than actual sales. So when you use general promotions — even at just 5% — nearly every sale ends up being marked as “advertised,” if not all of them.

[jbrusby]

That's an awful lack of knowledge from CS staff (or deliberate denial). Think everyone's graphs will look like this who still uses general promotions after 24th June. Ebay will love it because it tells them it's working exactly as they planned, and they can now factor into their income projections that every item that gets put on promotion will bring them promotion fees. The lack of transparency for sellers is terrible though, how are we meant to know whether a listing is faring well in organic search results if organic sales are assigned as promoted? It would at least help to know when in the last month that click was, which made it automatically a promoted sale later on.   

I've always had everything at the minimum of 2% and sold maybe 33% on promotion each month. Now it's 100%, costing me £100s more each month. It's unsustainable, on top of increased postage thanks to RM making 2nd Class unusable and forcing use of Tracked services, and I'm going to have to do as others in taking promotions off and get through the dip for a few weeks.  

[nutrafituk]

It is really worth going through both Advertising/Campaigns and Performance/Sales/Promoted Sales sections for the last 3 weeks. There is plenty of data to go and understand the impact of this money-grabbing action taken by ebay. 

Interestingly, if you go to Performance/Traffic you can still see the actual figures for buyer's behaviour in terms of organic views. Still same 50/50-ish ratio here as before for impressions, then organic views mostly to turn into 'promoted sales' in Quantity Sold. It is worth keeping an eye on this numbers in terms of making decisions or recovery if you decide not to participate in this farse. Sales here have gone down, like any other numbers whilst Promoted Listings cost has shot through the roof. 

It has been 6 weeks now since we have started pulling the plug out from Promoted Listings, bit by bit on daily basis. As much as it is grim our otganic sales have started picking up gradually and make up c. 30% of all sales - compared to 50% before. Hopefully, with time they will bounce back soon. Not paying a penny extra to ebay for sure.