eBay takes £21 for "promoting" a £140 sale.

[pillarboxred]

I got the sale which had a good number of "watchers" by hacking the price down to £140. I would love to know what eBay did to promote it for £21!!!!. Doesn't their Search Engine work these days?

[thesmokingrunner]

Obviously eBay's Search Engine does work in one way or another otherwise no-one would have seen your listing...

I'm probably not the only one who is a little puzzled as to why you're asking just what eBay did to rack up £21 in promotion costs. Surely you found out what you were going to be paying for before you promoted the item? If you didn't then you might want to have a read of this before you promote an item in future:

https://pages.ebay.co.uk/promote-your-listings/faq/b2c/

[Anonymous]

Top tip: rather than pay to promote your listings - just reduce the prices by the amount it would cost to promote them.

[pillarboxred]

I thought Promoted would show my item to a buyer who had not searched for it. The item was a picture of a place. The place name was in the Title, in the Item Specifics and in the Item Description. The buyer told me he searches using the place name as the Search Keyword. He saw it in the simple Keyword Search Returns. I am very angry as I feel cheated. I am taking this further. Promoted would be worth it if it found a buyer who had looked for a different but nearby place and eBay showed my item and sold it to someone who hadn't looked for it: that would be worth paying for.

[pillarboxred]

Where did you find that gem of wisdom? For a start, the promotional payment is calculated as a percentage of the Final Value bid, which is of course unknown. 

[thesmokingrunner]

You know, I'm really not sure anyone knows precisely how Promoted Items works any more than anyone really knows how Search works these days but possibly your primary mistake was that you assumed Promoted would work in a certain way. In all honesty (and please don't take this the wrong way) if you weren't sure you should have checked, not assumed; it appears that you signed up for something you didn't fully understand.

As for Promoted showing items to buyers who haven't searched for them - No. No, no, no. That would be an absolute nightmare. Are you seriously suggesting that eBay shows items on a random basis to people who haven't searched for them? Someone searches eBay for, say, a camera and is instead shown a 9cm sugar bowl? Wow. I really cannot believe that anyone would think that a good idea...

Good luck in taking it further, but I think you're wasting your time.

[tommystrezures]

The flip side (and yes I may be being a little flippant, so don't take my reply the wrong way) Ebay as a platform which you sell on has one of the largest reaches in terms of customer bases world wide.

I guess some of it would be how long did it take to sell? Would it have been the same amount of time as not promoting?

As  @thesmokingrunner  suggests it would be a no no, for any of us to be looking for a certain type of product not related to the item you sold for it to appear in the myriad of ads that already appear.

I would guess that as a promoted item you would appear higher in the search pages on the specifics (possibly as a sponsored item?) On the rare occasion we have used them we ensure that we have plenty of other bits for sale in the hope that someone will then look at our further listings.

In part, I think its a catch 22, a lot of the time when we search for bits those that a sponsored we avoid as they aren't always necessarily the cheapest, at the end of the day I don't know what the real solution is.

[the-nutwood-collection]

Yes, eBay does show items on a random basis to people that haven't searched for them.

For years I've had a saved search for ephemera related to a Victorian hospital.  It worked very well, I bought loads of stuff.

Now, I get tangential items on the email such as books on midwifery and other related medical matters, reports on hospital hygiene, first aid kits, prosthetics, medical equipment and equine hospital management.

I don't buy a lot these days.