Promoted Listing Advanced (PLA)
Hi Everybody,
My sales have fallen off a cliff since early June, and the only thing I could see as a reason is that I didn’t sign up for it, so from £6000 a month to around £200 in sales is the way eBay sew as a fitting punishment for not signing up after 20+ years and impeccable selling record.
Reading through it, it became clear that average sellers are now considered surplus to requirement, and to avoid legal disputes for closing accounts down for no reason, they decided to force sellers to do their dirty work, and quit of their own accord.
I started setting up a campaign just out of interest, and this is what I found
- To compete for terms that used to be free categories on a listing page such as “art deco, art nouveau, arts & crafts, Edwardian, Victorian etc, the minimum price to win one of these terms was £2.0 per click
- With a store with around 200 items; if every item got just ONE click per day, eBay will go to my bank while I am asleep and withdraw £400+ VAT every day
- Items in the categories I usually list in have a couple of dozen watchers before someone makes the jump, which means around 100 views are a good average before a sale, so for a £200 item, eBay will charge me £200+VAT for the clicks, £25+Vat for FVF, not to mention taking a bite of my packaging & shipping charge, then charging me £100 a month for a store rent, not to mention reconciliation charges if buyer was from outside UK, and additional charge for collecting IRS duties from US buyers
There are 100s of 1000s similar sellers in my position, can anyone please tell me if they see a way out of this, I’d love to hear from anyone who can.
Thank you for your time
Mansour
stuff4divas
·3 years ago@mannyman0_1 maybe u will receive better advice from the UK site since most here in the US don't know about UK sales
my-cottage-books-and-antiques
·3 years agoI am sorry to hear about the drop in sales you have ben experiencing. There are a range of factors that might have decreased your sales. Personally, I strongly doubt the existence of PLA is the culprit. Here in the USA at least, ebay has acknowledged that PLA is not a good fit for single quantity listings of non-new merchandise. So I doubt they are "punishing" you for not using a tool they acknowledge isn't really designed for a seller of one-offs.
I think I would look elsewhere for the cause. (Keeping in mind, too, that correlation is not causation.)
cool.jewels.by.jeff
·3 years agoThats the typical ebay consistency. Why should sellers be forced to pay more money on top of high fees on everything (sales tax & Postage) to have their items promoted. Soon the first 10 pages will only be promoted listings and sales will fall even further. Sellers are leaving ebay and going else where.