Off Site Ads to be tested on eBay

[shellhut]

eBay the ever greedy site hinted that they will try what Etsy has done to charge you more in fees if someone clicks on an item (however many times) from another site like google or pinterest and charges a fee just for someone LOOKING (clicking) at  your item and not even buying.  I am so out of here!

https://www.ecommercebytes.com/C/blog/blog.pl?/pl/2021/5/1619984161.html

[my-cottage-books-and-antiques]

chapeau,

I sell mostly long tail stuff, a lot of it will show up on the first page of search results because there usually aren't a lot of them listed (assuming a narrow enough search term). So I'm not sure PL does me much good there. But from what I can tell, many of my PL sales aren't the result of better placement on the search results page, I think they are the result of placement on one of the non-search pages, and the buyer makes an impulse buy. My impression is that ebay is getting better at matching the item with the buyer, and I'm getting sales because of it. So, I'm with you, I think PLs are a useful tool for me....

[chapeau-noir]

What's also nice is it's all voluntary. 

Etsy not only has made OSAs mandatory for sellers who sell over $10k/year (and I think they moved to including shipping in that but that needs to be fact checked - I quit selling there a bit ago so I never visit the site anymore), but it's like the Roach Motel - once you're locked into it, you can't get out, and as one poster said upthread - the criteria is very suspect. 

Before this bogus system, they had PPC which was basically useless - I quit after about six months.  I had tried the new system and it was even worse.

[femmefan1946]

from ebay's perspective, PLs provide two things: additional revenue from the PL fees, but also....and quite importantly....increased sales velocity across the platform.

Exactly.

And... cheap!