eBay Protection Money: "Your ad rate cap is low and may prevent your ads from being seen"
I know that eBay staff reads at least some of these messages. I hope that this one will gain some traction.
I've been with eBay for 26 years. Back in the day, we were just people selling stuff in our attics and garages. How much we got didn't matter all that much because we valued our items at essentially nothing. We paid a listing fee and a FVF and that was it. But this is now, and we are buying items from people who eBay, helpfully, allows to look up "sold" prices on the site or app. This means that we no longer have 90% margins on the items we sell. We have, after our regular business expenses, maybe 10-25% profit margin. And as time goes on, eBay is demanding more and more "protection" money for the privilege of showing our items to customers. I have lately been receiving the message "Your ad rate cap is low and may prevent your ads from being seen" when I promote my items. Really? If I don't give you AT LEAST FIVE percent of my sales PLUS listing fees, PLUS store fees, PLUS final value fees, you aren't going to let people see my listing?
In many categories, the "recommended" bribe to be seen on the first couple of pages is 10-25%. eBay, as a company with no products to sell, has a huge profit margin. Most sellers don't. How are we supposed to make a living and pay our bills if eBay takes more and more of our already slim profit margins, just for the privilege of being seen?
jupiter_collectibles
·2 years agoThey are trying to push people to promote in double digits. So they get a final value fee twice basically. It's getting out of control and they are taking most of the profit sellers even make. So they are basically telling you if you promote below 5%, they're not even going to show your stuff. So why are we paying for promotions?...
vintagecraze50
·2 years agoThe extremely high ad rates should only be used for some items not a lot. Nobody could sell anything and make a profit if they used high high ad rates on their entire inventory unless Grandma gave the stuff to you in an inheritance.
itemresa
·2 years agoIt's funny that you mention inheriting inventory. We actually have a large stockpile of used auto parts that my business partner inherited from his dad (he built custom cars for folks back in the 80's & 90's, we list these parts on another one of our eBay accounts) and even though we have zero invested in these parts we still ignore eBay's ad rate suggestions when listing them. We do promote them at a higher ad rate than the other items we sell but there's no way were going to give eBay an extra 13-15% (the average suggested ad rate for these parts, a few have suggested ad rates as high as 20%) to sell them. For the items we do have money invested in we stick to a 5% ad rate.
itemresa
·2 years agoYou're using Promoted Listing Advanced, we use Promoted Listing Standard and have been seeing a similar message when we look at our listings through the app.
Ignore these messages. They're nothing more than a scare tactic to get sellers to use eBay's suggested (and absolutely absurd) ad rates. As with anything eBay suggests to sellers the sole purpose of these messages is to inflate eBay's bottom line, not to help sellers. Promote your items at a rate that makes sense for your business and tell eBay to suck it.