eBay Screws Sellers with Promoted Listings

[rich_r]

Just stumbled upon this reality a few minutes ago. Looking for items comparable to mine, I searched for '1974 cutlass promo'. To my surprise, this is what came up:

Note that it says there were 3 results, followed by 2 Sponsored (the last one happens to be my own listing).

Then, notice that both Sponsored results actually include all of the original Search Terms. Therefore, they should have appeared in the search results even without any promotion.

Why is eBay charging me to "promote" my listings when they would have already shown up in an organic search? (And, to add insult to injury, why do they appear after the non-promoted listings??)

[sapphire_studio · Accepted solution]

They don't show your listing twice (like one organic and one promoted). So if you paid to sponser it (and have a high enough percentage to win the sponsored slot) then it will only show up as a sponsored listing and not an organic listing. Some people say they don't even look at the sponsored listings they skip right to the organic ones. Others say they have ad blockers that actually block the sponsored listings from showing up.

Don't promote anything that has very little competition like this item. I sell beauty products and some of my items only have a few people I'm competing with and I definitely don't sponsor them. I only sponsor items that have like 20 other people selling the same thing and I'm not the lowest price. In that case it's worth losing my organic position to be at the top in a sponsored position to take advantage of the buyers that are lazy and don't scroll very far.

[monica-sells]

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@rich_r wrote:

Then, notice that both Sponsored results actually include all of the original Search Terms. Therefore, they should have appeared in the search results even without any promotion.

Why is eBay charging me to "promote" my listings when they would have already shown up in an organic search? (And, to add insult to injury, why do they appear after the non-promoted listings??)

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I am not sure you understand the concept of "promoted listing"

Were you surprised they showed up using the search terms you are wanting it to show up for?

I don't understand what the surprise is...

You think that it should show up WITHOUT the promoted listing being displayed on the listing?

With only 5 listings, it is unnecessary to have promoted listings on it unless you are trying to get exposure within the parameters of the general subjet "promo cars"

[rich_r]

Apparently I failed to explain myself well.

All 5 of those listings—not just the first 3 but all 5—would and should have shown up organically (without promotion and not "Sponsored") with those search terms. However, it appears that eBay (1) gave them "Sponsored" status, which means the sellers will be charged the promotional fee if the prospective buyer clicks on the Sponsored listing even though the Sponsored status did nothing to 'promote' those items, and (2) even though they're Sponsored and meet all of the search criteria, they appear after all of the non-Sponsored results as if they only appeared because they're Sponsored.

Plus, as someone else mentioned above, it would make more sense for both of those Sponsored listings to appear twice in the results; once organically and, after all of the organic results, again as Sponsored. At least then the buyer has the option to click on the organic listing (some buyers choose to ignore Sponsored listings, and some ad blockers actually hide Sponsored listings).

Hopefully that better explains how eBay is clearly screwing many of us who make use of their Promoted Listings feature.