Promoted Listings...At What Percentage?

[12345jamesstamps]

I looked at the lowest "buy it now" in my items for sale category and on that "first page"...clicking "see more results" of course.

Did you ever wonder at the bottom of the page there are "2 sponsored listings"?

How did they get there?

I checked these sellers and of course they sell thousands of items.

The sellers will promote just a few items at 30-40% expecting them not to really get sold..these sellers can afford it of course if they do sell...and there items not matter the prices ...not always the lowest will be on that first page.

So I promoted 2 items at 30% and 40% and knocked a seller off on the first page of the lowest items for sale. Interesting!

And I managed to get my items shown on other seller's pages. Now mind you, pretty sure my 2 items won't sell but I can afford it anyway.

The purpose is to get notice on the first page of the lowest items for sale and on other seller's sites.

The "big sellers" can do it and get a lot of business.

Will be interesting to see where this goes.

[my-cottage-books-and-antiques]

@12345jamesstamps 

Always worth testing stuff. I did a low to high search for an item and saw something similar: no sponsored results on the page except for the last two (both of which appeared higher up the page as organic results). They were not the two highest price items, so apparently the designated sort order is maintained by ebay basically ignoring sponsored items except for the last two. 

While I can see that using a high enough PLS rate might get an item onto this low to high results page (at the very bottom), I'm not sure I see great value in that with the search I did, since both of the items show up organically even higher on the page.

I think my take away from your experiment might be just a little different----that it might be worth choosing an abnormally high rate for a small percentage of items, and use them as a kind of loss leader (if they sell and you pay the high rate it might hurt, but if they draw people into your store where you sell a bunch of non PL stuff, it might be worth it).

[12345jamesstamps]

What was interesting was a seller who is able to get his "promoted auction" at the bottom of the "buy it now" first page. Apparently if it is promoted high an auction gets placed on the " buy it now" page.

[my-cottage-books-and-antiques]

@12345jamesstamps 

Oh, I must have missed where you said one was an auction. I would guess that is a result of ebay replacing PLE for auctions with PLS, which previously was only FP items. My guess is, the two PLS listings at the bottom of the page do not conform to the low to high (as they aren't the 2 highest price items), so they probably don't need to conform to the choice of Buy It Now either. I would think that ebay considers those 2 spaces as reserved for PLS listings that (more or less) match the search term query, but do not need to meet the actual search order or other criteria.

[redlinear]

No need to promote.
Just enter a couple thousand words in Item Specifics and your stuff will show up 1st.

@12345jamesstamps 
  But yeah, I do that Promoted "bait" also.   It does work

[vintage_sterling_spoon_rings]

I tried 'Sponsored Listings' for the first time this week.

It was only on one item and for the first 10 minutes it was great, top of the listings... But within a half hour it had dropped so far down list that many of my other non sponsored items were ahead of it.

Lesson learned, sure glad I only did it with one item. To quote the raven... 'Nevermore'.