1 BEST ANSWER
Accepted Solutions
I wish I hadn't clicked on the link to read about this in corporate pig lipstick speak. Just .... so, so gross. Yeah, it's all about "simplifying" and "standing out from the crowd" (uh no, PLE is what made my listings stand out from the crowd, now they'll just be crowded into an already too-crowded crowd, including duplicate listers).
Look at this. Why make a spectacle of asking yourself a question that you'll non-answer the heck out of, in fact LIE?
When you pay the cost has nothing to do with whether it's more. And LOL no what you pay is NOT up to you; it's literally up to the bidders! If I apply a 10% ad rate and the winning bid is $50, I'll pay $5; if the winning bid is $100, I'll pay $10. And um YEAH, it's definitely going to be more than the $1.50 - 3.00 that PLE costs, in just about any scenario.
And I didn't even think about THIS. This was another major reason I liked PLE so much; people who looked at my auctions would also look at my BIN's, and if they bought them I didn't get Halo'd for it. Just sickening. 
@gurlcat wrote:
Here's the thing I don't get. -Why did they ever have a different scheme for auctions? When we were talking about this before and you told me they were pulling PLE for Germany, I could be wrong but I believe it appeared there would just be no promotion option for auctions, like it was before PLE. I thought there was some mechanical reason why PLS couldn't work with auctions. So, if it can, then why did they offer such a cheaper option for them in the first place?
@gurlcat When they discontinued it in Germany, they did the same thing they are doing now in the US, introduced the ability to add auctions to PL Standard campaigns instead.
Here was that announcement (translated by Google):
As far as why have separate a separate product for auctions to begin with, while I do seem to remember there may have been some hinting at technical limitations, I don't remember eBay really ever directly saying that was the reason.
If you go back and look at the eBay Ads blog from around the time it was introduced and other marketing they did around it, they seemed to be positioning it as they did it because they believed auctions were used more by casual sellers and that those casual sellers would prefer an upfront fee because it would be more simple than Promoted Listings Standard.
For an example, go back and listen to VP Alex Kazim's section at Investor Day 2022 (around the 1 hr 32 min mark) https://www.ebayinc.com/investor-day/
This was in 2021/2022 before Halo attribution and everything else and to be perfectly honest I've always thought the decisions they made back then were basically driven by the fact that they were under pressure from Wall Street to bring new ad models to the table because investors were skeptical that the cost per sale model alone could drive long term sustainable revenue growth. So they threw a bunch of spaghetti against the wall in the form of PL Standard External, PL Advanced Cost Per click, PL Express flat rate for auctions and then eventually the Display Ads for Stores and Offsite Ads they are pushing now to see what would stick.
No real data to back it up, but I think PL Express being designed the way it was may have had more to do with wanting to test out how sellers would react to that model than to any specific technical hurdles. I could be wrong and it could just be that it took them that long to figure out how to actually integrate auctions into PL Standard too - but if that was the case, I would think now they have it figured out they could just keep the Express model if they wanted to and offer PL Standard for auctions as an option too, just like you can use both Standard and Advanced for the same Fixed Price BIN.
As you and @my-cottage-books-and-antiques pointed out, eBay didn't do a great job of promoting it or of helping sellers to understand what types of auctions it would work best for to avoid paying a set fee on something that might not sell, which likely contributed greatly to lower adoption rates than they wanted to see. And in typical eBay fashion that was probably reported to the powers that be as a sign that the model was not popular/wouldn't work rather than reflecting on what role their handling of it may have played in sellers either not even knowing about it or being reluctant to try it out.
So they switched gears to go full on with pushing the Cost Per Click Advanced and finding ways to milk PL Standard for every penny they could with Halo attribution etc., which makes them more money and they probably have internal reports telling them Express wasn't really that popular any way so...why not pull the plug on it?
Well you want to know what's really messed up about that Suggested Ad Rate? -It is ALLEGEDLY a suggestion based on the item and how much competition it has with other sellers offering the same or similar items, as well as how high they are promoting theirs. Like "if you really want an edge, here's how much you should promote." The presupposition is that it is purely market forces that cause it to rise, just the facts, nothing personal, DEFINITELY not aimed at messing with your head. And there are a few sellers here who staunchly defend that as "true," that the only reason it changes is because of "seasonal" reasons, fluctuations in buyer interest, blah blah blah. Kinda funny how it only "fluctuates" upwardly though, isn't it? Anyway, the assertion is that the SAR is sitewide factual data, the same for all sellers selling that item (or similar) at the same time. They also call it the "trending ad rate". But ..... watch this.
After a few minutes and a waive of my magic wand.....
So then, what is the REAL trending ad rate for an Arnold Scaasi pair of clip earrings? Why did it SUGGEST such widely different rates for me only minutes apart? If you want to know how I made it do that, I would say PM me but I learned my lesson from that before. What I did is really not complicated; if you look at all the columns you can probably get an idea although there's a little additional tweak I had to figure out from trial and error.
Anyway, no it's not just your imagination, it's a manipulated feature that IS meant to mess with your head.
