How many had Success With Promoting your listings
Just looking to see who else has had success promoting listing , heard good and bad. Im ok with paying the fees especially when ive seen a sudden increase in sales. Lots of people on the eBay groups and Facebook groups complain about the percentages and fees eBay charge . But if you have a brick and mortar instead of eBay page your gonna pay utilities and Rent . So I think there no way of getting away from having to pay someone somewhere
35 comments
reallynicestamps
·8 months agoI found I got more Views and that the Views were on all my listings.
And I got more Sales, but I got more sales on nonPL listings than on PL.
I think for me, using 2% fee on about 10% of my listings, it was very cheap advertising.
I rarely spent more than $10 a month on PL fees and usually it was under $5.
I ended all my PL listings in November because I don't understand how the current Halo effect changes will affect me.
tobaccocardyahoo
·8 months agoI had got the same effect by adding one night of auctions per week of items which sold far better than I thought they would.
More sales got me more views and all of my listings.
Could it be that if Ebay decides you can be counted on to sell more items for them, they give your listings better treatment in the search results?
my-cottage-books-and-antiques
·8 months ago@tobaccocardyahoo that's definitely how it works for multi quantity listings, on a listing by listing basis. eBay has been clear on that. But whether success measured in terms of overall store sales actually moves the algo, eBay has not said.
12345jamesstamps
·8 months agoDidn't see any success with promoting in my category.
I have same exact items as other sellers and mine items were cheaper and were promoted up to 20%.
And yet I would not see my promoted items that were cheaper under exact same items of other sellers...even at 20%.
I turned off promoting...
kensgiftshop
·8 months agoIt's been a few years, but I tried promoted listings when they first started and didn't really notice a difference in sales from the promoted listings and the ones that wasn't.
tobaccocardyahoo
·8 months agoPromotion gives sellers an advantage if their items are short on views because of where they fall in the search results.
It should not affect impressions.
If you have little competition selling exact item you are promoting, and your buyers are looking for it, not doing some general broad search it will probably not help.
If no one is looking for your item, you might make an impulse sale you would not have otherwise made because it was promoted, and someone felt taken with it.
Promotion does not help me at all. The stuff I sell is too weird, and the buyers even weirder.
jonathanbrightlight
·8 months ago@tobaccocardyahoo It would be the other way around, right? Promoting increases Impressions (the listing being shown in search results) but not Views (a potential buyer clicking on your listing and being shown the listing page).
tobaccocardyahoo
·8 months ago@jonathanbrightlight
Not as I understand it. If it is included in the search results whether on a page which a buyer looks at or not, it is an impression. If the placement is higher, it is still only an impression. If it appears on someone else's listing page, does that count as an impression? I doubt it because it is unlikely to be handled by the same code which counts impressions in a search, and because external views are not counted as impressions.
If the buyer clicks through to your listing it is a view.
Ebay provides us with identification of the number of listings which make the top 20 impressions which should have a greater probability of getting a view.
An increase in the number of impressions does not usually lead to an increase in views, and if you do not have a view you cannot have a sale.
I could easily live without knowing how many impressions I get, or whether I am in the top 20, since whatever correlation they have with views is for some mathematician or statistician to try to phantom.
Most of us get lots of impressions which the buyers never see, and they are counted.
my-cottage-books-and-antiques
·8 months ago@tobaccocardyahoo If my item shows up on your listing page as a "sponsored" listing and someone opens your listing page, an impression is recorded for my item. Impressions are not limited to the Search Results page. This is why impressions can jump quite high for general ads, because they can show up on so many pages beyond the Search results page. But quite often, on those other pages, they are showing up in front of someone who has zero interest in them.
Still, my experience in the early days of Promoted Listings was, for my kind of stuff, showing up on those pages was like being seen by a browser, who bought my items impulsively. They weren't actually searching for my item, but once they saw it, they bought it. As I predicted back then, as more and more sellers started using them, it became less effective.
You sell primarily to buyers who have very specific wants in mind, and so they are searching, whereas my buyers are sometimes searching very specifically, but more often are browsing, rather than tightly searching for something very specific.
jonathanbrightlight
·8 months ago@tobaccocardyahoo We’re saying the same thing, it just came across wrong in my last comment. I wasn’t referring to the ads on someone else’s listing page, just that if a potential buyer clicks through to see your listing it’s a View, vs an Impression, which don’t involve any interaction with your listing from the potential buyer.
kibble-net
·8 months agoYep - that pretty much sums it up.
As you correctly noted, owning a B&M store has LOTS of expenses. So does having a standalone website. Most sellers here don't know how good they have it.
That being said, I think folks are rightly upset about the new attribution rules. For ebay to take credit for a sale they didn't make seems very unfair. However, for me it's a big shrug, as it's the customer who pays for ebay's greed. Starting today every order from my store comes with an extra 50 cent fee to cover this new attribution change. It's just another tariff situation.
It's good to be mindful of the existence of fees, but as part of a business, you must put it all into perspective.
pls-consignments
·8 months agoYou're exactly right regarding "hardworking sellers to getting back to the basics". Since ending PL, I've been focusing on listing EVERYDAY. I also send offers every day as well, knowing that I don't have to figure in PL costs before doing so. I must tell you, it's been quite liberating.
gurlcat
·8 months ago@pls-consignments Since you've been listing more often, does that also mean you now have a much higher number of listed items than you did in October? That's the only way I can reconcile such a nice increase in sales despite ending promotion. A bigger store would almost inherently have more sales.
I'm not knocking that strategy at all; I think it's great. The only foreseeable problem for anyone to emulate it is having items to list every day. One would either need to have a backlog of inventory waiting to be listed, or the liquid capital to acquire more.
That is the problem I always run into. Do I have some unlisted inventory? Yeah, sure, and I can imagine anyone pointing at it and saying there's no excuse not to list it. They'd be right, but if they took a closer look and knew the categories well, they'd see it's mostly low-value and/or long-tail stuff, and not even that much of it really. Still worthwhile, but meanwhile I know where/how to get much more exciting, easier-selling, VERY profitable items ..... when I have the funds to acquire them, but therein lies the problem. So many times I thought I had enough capital to invest in so much inventory (and a wide spectrum of it) that I'd finally have the momentum to never shrink down again. But financial emergencies always seem to come along and snap up my would-be restocking purse. Then my listed items keep selling, but I can only use that revenue to pay bills, and before I know it I'm itty-bitty again.
Like I have Small Store Syndrome or something.
pls-consignments
·8 months ago@gurlcat Yep, its "apples to oranges". There are a lot of variables to consider, such as store size and primary categories. However, I think you've touched on an obvious challenge.... having the inventory to list "every day". I happen to have 3-4 years of inventory to list that I've acquired via sweat equity through another business of mine. I use this to feed my eBay store with inventory without having to hunt.
So, listing 5-10 items daily is normal for me, which I knew I had to keep up in order to see sales rebound after ending PL. However, keep in mind that I primarily sell in the vintage collectibles category. Therefore, I can only speak from that perspective.
pls-consignments
·8 months agoThis seems like the appropriate place to post my 90-day results after ending all PL on Oct 29th. Yes, my sales fell shortly after. But staying the course has proved beneficial. 😉
tarotfindsandmore
·8 months agoIt doesn't look like your views actually fell. It looks like your organic views came up and offset any loss from the promoted views.
We can't see the sales in that chart. Would love to know the extent to which sales fell, percentage-wise.
pls-consignments
·8 months agoMy sales have been steadily increasing.
tarotfindsandmore
·8 months agoVery nice! Congrats, that's extremely heartening news. Have you changed anything else (discounts? offers? listing quality?)?
I think this latest move from ebay, charging a promotion fee regardless of who clicks/buys may backfire for both sellers and the platform. It is, however, a great way to motivate legitimate, hardworking sellers to get back to basics. The days of picking up any old piece of trash and then dumping it on the site while relying on ebay to get it sold via promotions are probably coming to an end. It's just not going to be profitable.
A lot more time, effort, and care will be required to use promotions in a way that will result in real profit. That energy could definitely be better spent hunting for quality merchandise, providing good customer service, and working with buyers to offer prices that both we and they can live with.
shire123
·8 months agoI am guessing that promoting helps in certain categories. I have never promoted anything and am satisified with averaging 2 sales per day. But most of my sales are in the collectible toys area.
mozartbach1971
·8 months agoIt's hard for me to tell since I do auctions, and most of the items are unique.
jonathanbrightlight
·8 months agoI’ve shared our experience before, but we had an increase in views and sales despite a decrease in impressions when we stopped promoting our listings. Fewer searches displayed them, but the buyers who saw them clicked and purchased a higher percentage of the time when they were being found organically, which makes sense in hindsight.
tarotfindsandmore
·8 months agoI've gone back and forth with promoting. I stuck with general flat rate 2-3% promotions for most of 2025, with many breaks lasting several weeks. During the breaks I ran sales and sent out coupons. The only bad month I had in 2025 was April. That month I didn't promote or run sales, but that was also the month tariff panic went bananas so it's not clear which variable (or combination of them) drove my sales in the tank.
In the end, the ebay gods say, for 2025, 39.2% of my sales were promoted items, but 27.7% of them were also the result of seller initiated offers so it's not super clear whether the promoting, or just good old-fashioned hustling, made the difference. Also, it's not obvious to me that the promotions were what made the difference as my three best months (>8K) also had the lowest percentages of promoted sales (~25%). Unfortunately, I'm not sure how to clear the noise in the data to pinpoint what really sold as the result of promotion vs. offers or other things.
One thing I do know that has worked for me BIG time is discounts. Both store sales and coupons have been extremely fruitful. I ended promotions for all but a half dozen items about a week ago and my sales/views haven't been affected at all but none of the half dozen promoted items have even gotten watchers (they're items that have sold in the recent past so it's probably not a lack of interest). The promotion fees are still dribbling through from previously promoted items so I won't really know what difference it made until the new system starts. Hopefully my discounts will offset any potential drop in sales.
my-cottage-books-and-antiques
·8 months ago@tarotfindsandmore When you say you are doing well with store coupons, are you talking about sending private coupons (for example, to previous buyers), or are you talking about running a public coupon as a sale, similar to running a regular discount sale? I've had very little luck with private coupons, so I'm just wondering....
tarotfindsandmore
·8 months agoYes, I mean the private, but also the public coupons. I send private coupons to both followers and previous buyers, and occasionally a friend or family will post the same code on their social media (I don't use social media myself).
The public coupons are for good for things that are already on sale. They don't require a buyer to manually add the code, they're automatically applied, but they do create a nice little banner on each listing page, and a bright red little notice in the search results that seems to be more effective than just being plopped near the top.
my-cottage-books-and-antiques
·8 months ago@tarotfindsandmore Thanks. So, for the public coupons, you're basically using them as a combo? For example, if I'm running a 20% off discount sale in my store, I could add a coupon campaign such as Buy 2, get an additional 10% off, which would be in addition to the 20% discount? The two discounts "stack", is that right?
my-cottage-books-and-antiques
·8 months ago@tarotfindsandmore I'll definitely give this a try at some point. One of the things I DON'T like about regular discounts is ebay does so little to highlight them on the search results page. But the red font for coupons definitely stands out. Very good idea (even if a seller just runs a coupon sale, without combining a discount sale with it.)
tarotfindsandmore
·8 months agoExactly!🙂 That's why my sale is actually a fairly low discount as a baseline. Lots of other sellers insist that you have to offer at least 30% off to get buyers' attention, but I find that the combination of multiple smaller combinable discounts brings in more views and gets more watchers who I can also send offers (5% off the sale price) to. I think the visibility with the colors and messages, coupled with giving buyers a sense that you're interested in giving them what they want, is more effective than being ahead of everyone.
my-cottage-books-and-antiques
·8 months ago@tarotfindsandmore Does the Seller Initiated Offer also stack on the discount and the coupon?
tarotfindsandmore
·8 months agoNope, it will only work with the sale price. It will stack with the sale but it cancels out the coupon code so, basically, it's better for the seller if an offer is sent. Offers make the little coupon area disappear at checkout on the buyer side, but when you make the offer you'll be making it on the sale price because it's the current price. Your original price won't be displayed in the offer box so it's a good idea to take a peek at it before you decide how low your bottom is.
kept2020vtgbikes
OP8 months agoI send coupons to previous customers that has made purchases which my repeat customer sales went up 15% by doing this
gurlcat
·8 months agoIt definitely gets me more views, which presumably means more sales.