Exciting new "easy boost" is here! General Ad Campaigns have never been easier!
Summary: The discussion revolves around eBay's new 'easy boost' feature for promoting listings, which allows sellers to effortlessly promote their items with a set percentage fee. Several participants, including my-cottage-books-and-antiques, chapeau-noir, and gurlcat, express skepticism about the efficacy and transparency of the feature, discussing concerns about cost, the effectiveness of promotions, and potential changes to attribution rules. carip17 shares an anecdote about a seller who spent excessively on promotions without a return on investment. There's humorous speculation about the rationale behind eBay's design choices, including a sarcastic remark from inhawaii about paying additional fees whether the promotion helps or not. Participants debate the implications of these changes on seller fees, with some expressing distrust and suspicion about eBay's motives and transparency.
Thanks ebay! Now it will be even easier for me to promote a listing and pay an additional fee when it sells, whether the promotion actually helped or not!
luckythewinner
·2 months agoIf eBay can raise more money through voluntary contributions from other sellers, maybe they'll be a little less likely to raise my fees.
meme6253
·2 months agoI don't understand how you think this is a great thing?, It's just another form of taking more money from you. The boost has been in play for awhile , I have chose not to use it.
my-cottage-books-and-antiques
OP2 months ago@meme6253 @inhawaii
I was being sarcastic. Maybe once they launch the new Community Boards they'll include a "sarcasm" emoji?
adamcartwright
·2 months agoI sure wish eBay would worry more about bringing new eyes to our listings than trying to wring promo fees from them.
I keep seeing ads for competitor V***** and wonder why those aren't eBay ads I'm seeing.
gurlcat
·2 months agoYou mean Vinted? (we can say it). So it's not just me? -They are suddenly EV-ER-Y-WHERE I look, and no I haven't clicked on anything of theirs, said their name out loud, so they're not 'following' me everywhere; they're just there already when I get there.
toomuchstuffagain35
·2 months agoEver since ebay live launched for real, I'm continually seeing ads online for Whatnot.
inhawaii
·2 months agoMe, the king of sarcasm, can't tell if you are being sarcastic or not.
broto_64
·2 months agoOh...
It automatically races seller vs seller, to the bottom.
First seller to select this for item X gets in at 2%
Second seller comes in and BOOM the automagic begins!
Both sellers are immediately pushed to MAX promo fee.
But...
How does one seller come out on top against the other?
valueaddedresource
·2 months agoSome interesting info from the Q1 2026 earnings report that I believe is relevant to this new "feature":
Total advertising revenue was $581 Million with 1st Party Ad revenue (all of eBay's various cost per click and cost per sale Promoted Listings ad options) making up the bulk of that figure at $555 Million, a 28% year over year increase.
During prepared remarks in the earnings call, it was also revealed that ~1.2 billion of the roughly 2.5 billion total listings on eBay were promoted during the quarter and 5.2 million sellers adopted at least one promoted listing product during the quarter.
In Q4 2025, those numbers were 1.2 billion of roughly 2.5 billion total listings and 4.8 million sellers.
eBay does not break those stats down further by type of 1st party ad product, but Promoted Listings General cost per sale ads are still by far the most widely used of all of eBay's ad offerings.
That suggests while more sellers may be trying Promoted Listings overall, existing users are becoming more selective and limiting which listings they choose to promote - in line with what I'm hearing anecdotally from sellers looking for ways to mitigate the effects of the new attribution policy.
Seems to me that Easy Boost is simply eBay's way of trying to easily boost the number of listings using PL/increase ad revenue by encouraging sellers to use blanket set-it-and-forget-it option instead of exploring other strategies.
my-cottage-books-and-antiques
OP2 months ago@valueaddedresource Agreed. As noted the ability to do something like this with PC has been there for quite a while, but it was clear at the last Check In that ebay must be seeing a larger percentage of sellers using the app to list and run their business and so they want to make it really easy on the app as well. This is definitely an attempt to encourage set it and forget it, and note the example they use suggests 10 to 12% as the average "sweet spot" ....which means any sale attributed to a General Ad will almost double ebay's fee take on that sale if sellers use the 12%.
Set it and forget it ---especially at 10 - 12%----is not for me, but I'm sure some sellers will go with it.
gurlcat
·2 months ago@valueaddedresource @my-cottage-books-and-antiques
Not only does the seller pay whether the promotion helped or not, in this version there isn't even any mention of requiring a single promoted 'click.' Just:
my-cottage-books-and-antiques
OP2 months ago@gurlcat LOL---yes, quite clearly the last thing they want to do is explain how their "attribution" rule works.
valueaddedresource
·2 months ago@my-cottage-books-and-antiques @gurlcat yeah I just assumed they didn't want to draw attention to it any more than they already have so they didn't put it in that FAQ.
But I imagine it's following the same attribution model since they are still General ads.
my-cottage-books-and-antiques
OP2 months ago@valueaddedresource As far as I know, the attribution rule hasn't changed. I would hope that if they change it, they will provide an announcement in advance of any change (although, sad to say, I would not be terribly surprised if they only told us after any change went into effect.)
My concern is they are wording this so obliquely because in the near future they intend to change the attribution rule yet again.
gurlcat
·2 months ago@my-cottage-books-and-antiques I think it's a joke to even have an attribution rule when it's as silly as 1 click by anybody in the past 30 days.
And I don't know about this version having the same rule. When I read "when your item sells", in the absence of any attribution talk, to me it sounds like "every time one of your items sells". Even though it's still General promotion, it's has distinctions in that you can't omit listings or have different rates on any listings. So I can't see any reason why it couldn't have it's own attribution rule, or rather a lack of one.
Does this thing even have its own section in the policy pages, or just this announcement??
my-cottage-books-and-antiques
OP2 months ago@gurlcat Could it be a new attribution rule just for app users who choose to use this tool? Well, I suppose it is possible, but I doubt it. I think ebay has realized that an actual explanation of the rule is one main reason many sellers have stopped using, or have severely limited their use of, general ad campaigns.
hartungcards
·2 months agoWhen are they going to get around to launching Easy Annual Increase in System Activity Experienced During This Period?
carip17
·2 months agoPossibly the dumbest thing ever.
Why not just implement where we pay per view. Minimum cost would be $10 per 1 view.
I would enjoy paying $1000 for 100 views and not getting a sale, because that is how I like to live dangerously.
gurlcat
·2 months ago@carip17 There was someonbe here for a while who was like that for real. Rung up $5700 in pay-per-clicks .... not in a year .... not in a month ..... IN ONE WEEK, and was gloating at all of us because she sold a $2700 painting.
https://community.ebay.com/t5/Selling/Paperclip-Nosedive-Update/td-p/34832880
Then a week later that buyer did a chargeback.
https://community.ebay.com/t5/Selling/Again-a-no-no-return-worth-over-2-500-dollars/td-p/34847356
@valueaddedresource I'm so glad Cara was post-2023, so she can come with us to the New World. 🤣
chapeau-noir
·2 months agoThis was an interesting person with an uninterpretable business scheme.
gurlcat
·2 months ago@chapeau-noir I'm going to be compassionate and terrible at the same time, and say I'd be shocked if she wasn't bipolar. The over-confidence, suspicions about simple returns being crimes, and yes of course the unbridled spending on promotion. All very mania-like.
stainlessenginecovers
·2 months agoAll I got out of it was an ear worm from the 80's disco song:
I'M SO EXCITED
AND I JUST CAN'T HIDE IT
jundedh2012
·2 months agoWhy was this not already a thing? Still im tired of all this promotions being pushed
toomuchstuffagain35
·2 months agoYeah, so what's new? I've been getting prompts to 'boost' my visibility for ages.
chapeau-noir
·2 months agoIt's automated now. You know, for higher speed wallet emptying.
toomuchstuffagain35
·2 months agoYeah, nah.
Not happening.
Maybe they should just go back to a wildcard search without all their manipulations and 'visibility promotions' and we'd be better off.
Ofc it never occurs to them that if it's easier for buyers to find our stuff it's better for ebay as well.
broto_64
·2 months agoThat is baffling, corporations eating their own hand to survive. In order to fully understand this phenomenon you first have to understand the people who make these decisions are your average hourly or salaried employees.
chapeau-noir
·2 months agoUnfortunately, wild cards don't work in semantic search engines.
toomuchstuffagain35
·2 months agoebay may like to THINK it has a semantic search engine but it decidedly cannot tell the context or intent of a search query. Heck, half the time it can't even get the correct words in the search.
chapeau-noir
·2 months agoIt's not the best written search engine, but there is so much tech debt that I'm not sure anything would work at this point. IMHO, eBay has made this site so complicated that things are always breaking.
bashort
·2 months agoI loved wildcards and used them all the time.
I also used to search by my fav category, auction only, ending soonest, no key words and scroll through a endless line of closing auctions. I have bought many thousands of dollars of ebay items like this but ebay ended this years ago. I can not imagine why ebay does not want potential buyers to be able to see what auctions are closing out
Now ebay search clearly prioritizes promoted listings regardless of if that is what the buyer is searching for
The more that ebay tries to get me to promote listings the more determined I become that I am not doing it
gurlcat
·2 months ago@bashort Ooo, what was "wildcard"? (I've had an account since 2003 but bought only sporadically until the 20-teens and started selling in 2018).
I have good news for you about that auction strategy. It does still work, in fact it's exactly how I shop for inventory. Now, whether it can be done with no keyword, I'm not sure, but what I do is use the broadest possible keyword, so for instance "jewelry lot". Then I refine by auction-only, US only, and sort by ending soonest.
If you give it a try right now, you'll see there are NO 'Sponsored' listings in the results. That is not the case with the default sorting of 'Best Match' of course, but even there you won't see all that many Sponsored ones. eBay used to really over-do that, and I think they cut back because it made buyers so angry. Now most promotion is done in the down-page module spaces, inside other sellers' listings (which makes us sellers angry, which eBay could not give one less flip about, obviously).
toomuchstuffagain35
·2 months agoYep, ebay effectively killed off all the sales we'd garner from buyers 'just browsing' newly listeds, ending soonest and (gasp) their favourite category.
valueaddedresource
·2 months agoIt kind of already was? Sellers have had the option to create rule-based ad campaigns for years, you can set it up to apply a single ad rate across all listings, and you can also set it to include all current listings and future new listings too.
Seems to me like Easy Boost just does that same thing only in the app with less clicks/taps.
chapeau-noir
·2 months agoIntroducing Easy Profit!