Sitewide ebay barely brings in more than 2 percent of Promoted Listings money when compared to sales
Restarting this thread because it devolved into people arguing over terms. I am simply not going to use any of those terms.
Last year a total of 74.67 billion dollars in sales flowed through ebay. This included sales tax and shipping paid. (not including vehicles, that part is tracked separate).
From that 74.67 billion dollars in sales ebay pocketed themselves 1.64 billion dollars in total ad money.
That means that ebay made themselves 2.1 percent of the amount of sales in ad money. Heck, lets round up to 2.2. If you wanted to count that ad money as part of the sales money as well then the number is almost unchanged, becoming instead 2.24.
Almost all of that advertising money is promoted listing money. Promoted listing money is also charged on sales tax and shipping, which lines up perfectly with the sales total counting those numbers.
Notice what a relatively small portion of the total sales that is?
It could make one think that promoted listings may not be as necessary as some might think they are.
johnrj1226
·1 year agoFolks (other long time eBay sellers) report that eBay that other similar on line venures have fees that are "more bigger" than eBays - e.r. the Bigger A.. Suspect some one would have to be very close to the top finance dude at eBay to know what funds went where in their financial statement - seeing they are a global company and have to deal with things like exchange rates that are forever changing. Lee Iaccoca (the creator of the Ford Mustang* in 64 and savior of Chrysler Corp[oration with his joint venture (80% Mitsubishi - 20% Chrysler) once said ( something to this effect (I am surrounded by the best accountants in the world but I cannot tell you if our 20% investment into Diamond Star made 1 cent but I don't care as Chrysler Corporation is a very profitable company today and Chrysler is debt free."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Iacocca
* actually assembled Mustangs at the Dearborn Assembly Plant summers of '64 thru '67 (total 39 weeks) - 'made 2.54 to 267/hr worked 68 hrs a week, line rate 68 cars/hour - no A/c and hard wood floors - lots of salt tablets available (never took one) - paid all my college expense for 4.5 years and a bit more.
gloryglorygifts
·1 year agoOn the flip side, I guess you can also say that the PL's do work for some, since ebay's revenue is based on actual sales vs cost per click.
onefootflipper
OP1 year agoI already agreed. You win ebay. I even picked you as best result.
Your viewpoint is 100 percent a valid one on it, and if I was using this data to launch the space shuttle then I would absolutely stand with you on it.
As an everything seller interested in data I simply see the number as shockingly low, I honestly would have expected something more in the 6-7 percent range.
I find the data very interesting and useful, and I thought other people might as well.
valueaddedresource
·1 year ago@onefootflipper I'll use purely hypothetical numbers to try to keep things round, and I'm going to keep this limited to assuming only General cost per sale ad fees to keep it simple, but hopefully it will be clear how this little thought exercise can be extrapolated out.
Let's say eBay had 2 Million Active Listings during a given time period and during that time period, 1 Million of those listings sold, with each transaction equaling $1 total with shipping and tax included.
eBay's reported GMV for that period would be $1 Million.
Now of the 1 Million listings which sold, let's say that 800,000 of them sold via Promoted Listings and 200,000 of them were organic sales with no ad fees applied.
Let's also say that those 800,000 sold via promoted listings all used the minimum 2% ad rate.
eBay's ad revenue on the total group of 1 Million sales would then be $16,000.
If you expressed that as a percentage of total GMV, that would be 1.6%.
Now you could look at this a couple different ways - one might be to say 1.6% is a tiny fraction of the total dollar amount sold, and that would be mathematically correct but it wouldn't tell you anything really useful about whether or not sellers need to use ads to make sales on the platform.
You could also look at it and go holy *&$% out of 1 Million listings sold, only 20% were organic and 80% used ads - and that still might not really tell you much because there's no way to know how much of that 80% might have sold organically if the seller had been brave enough to test not enrolling in PL.
And in the real world we can't do that kind of calculation because eBay doesn't provide that full picture.
Again to be clear, I'm not suggesting the real numbers would look anything like that - I don't know what the actual amount of sales made through promoted listings are any more than you do, I'm just willing to admit that and to say that the statistics we do have access to don't really provide enough data to be useful for sellers trying to figure out whether they really do need to use PL ads or not.
valueaddedresource
·1 year ago@onefootflipper honestly I wouldn't have even pointed it out if it weren't for the fact that your previous thread also contained many completely wrong and misleading statements and rather than have the humility to accept that and/or learn something from it, you had the thread locked and decided to continue providing other completely wrong and misleading information in another thread instead.
As to your point about the numbers, again I'll point out that the fact that the total dollar amount of ad revenue is only 2% of the total dollar amount of GMV tells us absolutely nothing about how many listings are sold via promoted listings ads and whether or not that means using promoted listings is necessary for most sellers.
The math is the math, it just doesn't say what you want to say it says.
If 100% of listings on the platform were sold through Promoted Listings ads and if they all used the average 2% minimum, that would still equate to 2% of GMV.
In that scenario would you still try to claim that 100% of listings sold is a "very small amount" or that it somehow proves that sellers don't need to use Promoted Listings to make sales just because the total dollar value only equaled 2% of GMV?
Total dollar amount of ad revenue will always be a relatively small percentage of total dollar amount of GMV precisely because of how PL General works (most sellers are not intentionally going to set their ad rates at 90%+).
But that doesn't tell the average seller anything that would be particularly useful in determining how many listings are being sold via promoted listings or whether or not they really need to use PL ads to sell their items.
valueaddedresource
·1 year agoFor anyone who missed the previous thread:
https://community.ebay.com/t5/Selling/For-those-of-you-who-think-you-NEED-promoted-listings/m-p/35208415/highlight/true#M2597286
@onefootflipper not sure what the point of asking for that thread to be closed was if you are just going to continue to provide misleading and/or just flat out wrong info in this thread.
"Last year a total of 74.67 billion dollars in sales flowed through ebay. This included sales tax and shipping paid. (not including vehicles, that part is tracked separate)." - False. eBay used to exclude vehicles from GMV years ago but that changed around 2014/2015.
Again for the record the actual current definition for GMV (since 2021) is: "the total value of all paid transactions between users on our Marketplace platforms during the applicable period inclusive of shipping fees and taxes."
Also whether you use the term GMV explicitly or not doesn't matter - the number you quoted is eBay's GMV figure for 2024, so we're talking about the same thing whether you call it that or not.
And again as I stated multiple times in that other thread - total dollar figures are not the same as total listings sold and continuing to conflate the two does not prove whatever point you are trying to make.
onefootflipper
OP1 year agoYou got me. You picked up a piece of incorrect additive text that has no bearing whatsover on the result of the math.
2+2 is 4 and Texas isn't a state. Pointing out that Texas is a state doesn't make 2+2 equal anything but 4.
Congrats, you got me. You won the internet. Obviously 2 percent is an incredibly large piece of the pie. I'll give you 2 more percent and then you can take that 32 percent of the pie back home with you.
Oh, and no hard feeling, this has been extremely stimulating. I can't believe I was still able to put my foot in my mouth with an incorrect statement that had no relationship to the math. You win this one for sure.
slippinjimmy
·1 year agoeBays "pie" is the 14% of GMV that eBay earns from fees, the Ad portion is about 15% of the pie, the other 85% of eBay fee revenue does not come from PL fees.
None of this tells us what percentage of sold listings were promoted and definitely doesn't tell us what percentage of the PL sales would have sold without using promotions.
The one thing we know absolutely is that Ad fees have increased eBay revenue by 15% at a minimum and that's not insignificant (about $1.5 Billion).