Simply-the-best-for-you Volunteer Community Mentor
@sailinship wrote:Thank you for your very logical and reasonable conclusion. It's an added fee with no ceiling IMO. If someone, either through choice, or mistake, pays really high Promotion fees, I assume that they get really high results, but I could be wrong.
I've heard that whether the fee you choose is 2% or 20%, you supposedly get the same results. I don't understand how that could be so.
Well there's no "hard ceiling". But there's a balance that can be achieved between raising prices and sacrificing some percentage of conversion rate for more impressions. That's the sad part about eBay. Logic dictates that if you're cheaper you will get more sales. But often times, it pays to raise promo rates 2-3% and raise the price. Though your conversion rate might go from 1.5% - 1%, your impressions might double, triple, or more.
But there is a price that buyers will no longer pay, you have to find that sweet spot. Considering many of our products are straight from manufactured prices and already < $5 margin, there's not a lot of room to work with.
What this ends up as, is all the sellers are investing in promos, and there's no way to stand out anymore. There's no way to compete. Feedback doesn;t matter, happy customers doesn't matter, etc. None of those will improve your traffic.
Regarding the promo percentage, for us it's like a switch. If we go straight 2% across the board, we get around 20% (or less) of the impressions we get if we do 4%, and for us I've posted graphs where our ORGANIC impressions lower alongside promoted impressions. But if we put it above 4%? No difference.
We recently raised many of our items by 2% this week to test this to see if anything changed, and this is our graph:
This is why I say it's a "switch". It's turned on now. Investing more doesn't really improve. But if we were to drop below the baseline to 2% and that turns the "switch" off? This is what happens:
As you can see, when putting the promos to the exact rate they were earlier? They don't even go back up to where they were before. You lose the momentum.
PLA seems to break the rules a bit. But you're paying for click at much higher potential rates. And then eBay doesn't give you as much traffic if you're moving far ahead of your average/31 days anyway, so....
You may want to read up on those search "perimeter"s though. There is no such thing as a "search perimeter". Well, unless you're in law enforcement on TV, searching a perimeter of a house. But that's not what this thread is about.
