eBay Current Promotional Strategy
This is what I believe selling has become on Ebay in 2025.
I've been buying and selling on ebay for 27 years and eBay is putting the "screws" to it's sellers. Ebay is intentionally holding back "Views" or "Watches" on Non-Promoted listings to force sellers into using their EXTREMELY EXPENSIVE PROMOTIONS!
GOOGLE: Perceived Throttling: Many long-time sellers report a pattern where organic views and sales drop significantly, particularly after stopping a promotion or experiencing a return. This has led some to speculate that eBay "throttles" organic reach to make paid promotions essential for maintaining previous sales levels.
12 comments
tobaccocardyahoo
·11 months agoSearch placement appears to be more complex than promotion trumps everything, or if you don't promote your listing they are relegated to the end of the line.
I am promoting only 5 of 5k+ listings and they are getting no traffic.
I am seeing a surge in views and sales which I attribute to my adding higher interest items to auction listings. As well as more views, and more sales, I have added more store followers.
redlinear
·11 months agoMaybe it's not called throttling?
I just searched: 1982 Porsche 911 Quarter Glass
Filted to USED
Sorted Low$ to High$
The 1st one on the page is BY FAR the most expensive.
This is the 3rd time today that I've noticed this.
I wonder if there's an interface at corporate where employees and ai just sit around and giggle about what's showing and what's not.
Maybe I should shop elsewhere. From a site I can trust
kalyoth
·11 months agoNot just in 2025. That has been ebays strategy since they first put in AI in 2020.
meme6253
·11 months agoSeems to be a constant roughly 50/50 split on whether or not to promote on this forum, So it works for some & not for others,All we can do is try it & see if it works for us & remains profitable.
pls-consignments
·11 months agoOf course. But, I believe more sellers use PL than not. The other consideration is net profit. I expect a bit of a trade off between a slight drop in sales, and a higher net profit. To me, it's kind of a wash.
However, the feeling of liberation from the marketing trap is more than worth it! 😀
christworks
·11 months agoI think the perceived throttling happens when making any adjustment to PL. At my peak use of PL I was around 12%. This was when I was first getting started again a few years ago. I gradually adjusted down to 10%, 8%, and then to where I am now which was larger than any of my previous downward movements. I have found that each adjustment down results in less views, including organic views, for about 2-3 weeks. I was able to shorten the time and overcome some of the effect by aggressively listing when I lowered it this last time, which was in 2024. It was about 10 days of low sales, then it bounced back.
Does eBay deliberately throttle? I don't think there is enough evidence to say one way or the other. It could simply be your listings have to cycle through once a PL listing has changed. I've noticed coming out of a sale there is drop, then the next day things pick up and sell at normal price the next day.
I think it also makes sense they might temporarily throttle when adjust down or coming off of PL hoping a seller may panic and go back onto PL or raise the rate again. Who knows.
I am not making any adjustments to PL during Q4. Once we get to January and I close up for a few weeks, I will either drop my PL rate once more or end it altogether while I'm closed and have my store set up on Time Away. That way any "punishment" will happen while I'm not working. 🙂
oregon_bins
·11 months agoI had been promoting everything at 4.4% and ended that a little over a week ago when they sent out the newsletter Announcing the promoted listing change in January. It looks like My views haven't really been affected. They seem pretty random day-to-day.
Part of how I Make sure I am getting views is to regularly use auctions. I'm lucky that a big portion of my business is pokémon cards which has enough interest that auctions can work (especially when my starting price is a price that I'm happy with but still on the lower side of comps to keep things moving).
So I know that not everyone can get away with running auctions, and it's not something that makes sense on my beauty products. However, it might make sense if I sold a giant lot of beauty products to a reseller. If you need a supplement your income you could try to gather old inventory into large lots and put them up for auction to make sure they gain views. I think a lot of people buy inventory from eBay. I buy my beauty products from Ulta but I buy all my pokémon cards from eBay lots.
broto_64
·11 months agoMy experience in all of the years, is that paid promotions always outrank organic listings, however buyers also know how to recognize promoted items and tend to avoid those since they realize the cost of that promotion is passed on to them. So why aren't organic results being shown?
Because there isn't enough space to show 2,000 items on the first page of results, quite often search engines do limit results shown in order to appear more relevant. This to me isn't throttling, most surfers never venture much past the first 4-5 results anyway, very few end up on the second page, and almost nobody ever surfs through three or four pages of results.
As far as throttling goes, I doubt ebay is doing that.
chappello1
·11 months agoI experienced pretty much the same thing. I have been selling on eBay for 25 years and never used any of the promotional "add-ons". Just last month I listed two separate items I have sold many times before, which usually sell very quickly. Nothing for weeks. Started checking on them - 0 views. In 25 years this has never happened. I tried to search one of them and nothing would show up. Contacted eBay and they couldn't find the item on search either. Ended the item and relisted and it sold within a day or two. The other item would show up in search but way down the list. It would have a little note on it saying, " need to boost". It finally sold. So I was thinking the same as you - that ebay was manipulating items to get me to use "promotions". Haven't checked any others lately - takes too long.
babyers88
·11 months agoIt doesn't say "need to boost" it shows a "boost" icon on some listings which is of course completely optional
where a particular item shows up on a list of same or similar items, depends on a lot keywords and how it is searched. Which is why keywords are so important.
doesn't matter how much "promotion" you pay or do not pay, if the right keywords are not there it's not going to show up period.
Then the icing on the cake is how savvy the buyer is, you could be promoting and be at the top of the list but the guy 2 listings under you has free shipping and a lower price
pls-consignments
·11 months agoI ended all PL advertising on Oct 28th. I feared that views and sales would plummet. It's been 7-days now. After the immediate plummet, both views and sales stabilized. My organic views are now up 42%, and my external views are up 127%!
I wish I ended PL long ago. I could have saved lots of money.
 
jonathanbrightlight
·11 months agoI’ve shared our numbers before. My company ended all promoted listings last year. We saw a steady increase in views and sales, and only the promoted impressions disappeared, of course, but our organic impressions are now higher than before. It’s been a net benefit to us to stop promoting. eBay doesn’t throttle you for not promoting.