Competing For Visibility

[meme6253]

I would like to hear others thoughts on the competing for visibility & Increasing ad rates, Good?, Bad?, Working for you?, Not Working?

[onlinecentral]

I have done the math for my store and I can not take a pay cut to run Promoted Listings.

I can not inflate my prices by 29% to run Promoted Listings at 20% percent to Maintain My Income.

[jhr-4800]

I sold 20 items this week, between my 2 accounts. Of those 20 items, I sold 12 by "Promoted Listings @ 2.4%". So more than half of my sales are coming from promoted listings.

[paulhua3]

I promote most listings at 1% and get many sales from promoted listings.

[my-cottage-books-and-antiques]

I recently lowered my PL rate and my sales have declined. However, I'm a very small seller and I have not listed anything new in a while, and so I am not really going to draw any conclusion from that. I will continue to use PL, and I hopefully will be adding new listings on a more regular basis soon.

But just a reminder: The COST of PLS will be increasing in June. Today, the rate you choose is applied to the item price, that will change to total price in June. Which means if your rate is 5% now, and 5% in June, that same 5% will be taking a bigger bite out of your net....how big depends on the difference between the item price and the total price.

[onlinecentral]

The Gold Standard of research is the Double Blind Study. You give half of the test subjects the medicine and the other half get the placebo. Afterwards, you compare the two groups.

I would challenge someone to experiment with identical listings on different seller accounts.

a) The original price on seller account A, with no promotion. A baseline or reference.
b) The original price on seller account B, with a promotion. Reducing your margin.
c) An inflated price on seller account C, with a promotion and an inflated price to offset the promotion and maintain your full income.

Does the promotion on choice B increase sales enough to justify the decrease in income?

Does the promotion on choice C just divert sales away to lower priced listings?

[my-cottage-books-and-antiques]

A few years ago, a seller did the only "test" of Promoted Listings that (probably) qualified as a true test...at least, the only one I've seen written up. The results were published on Tamebay. I don't have a link handy, but I'm guessing the posts are still there....

[radio741]

@meme6253  Hello, as an international seller selling from Greece we do not get enough visibility by the eBay algorithm, but if you are located in the USA then you need to check what you are selling. For example, we sell very hard-to-find electronic components so visibility in search results is usually not an issue. Only a few sellers list similar items to ours. But, if you sell something like t-shirts, perfumes and etc. promoted listed might work for you and increase your sales at first.  This will also give you a boost in visibility because you will get sales and watchers and your listing will appear higher in search results. 

You can start small and use promoted listed with a 2% fee at first and see how it works for you.

In our case, we stopped using promoted listings a year ago, and it did not negatively affect our sales but that depends on the case.  

PS: Return rate was much much higher of the items sold via the promoted listings to the point that we took notice of it 

[katzrul15]

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@meme6253 wrote:

I would like to hear others thoughts on the competing for visibility & Increasing ad rates, Good?, Bad?, Working for you?, Not Working?

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For Feb, our sales leveled off using 2-3% for promoted rates with PL standard.

Started a new campaign for March on 3/1 and promoted all listings with 5 watchers or more - 271 listings.   Used 4% on all.  

We sold (thru yesterday) 73 that were promoted and 19 that count as organic. 

Moved some older listings that were HV by going to 4%.  ymmv

Going to push to move HV items before 6/1 rate structure change.

Good luck!

[dbfolks166mt · Accepted solution]

      You have a significant number of listings why don't you setup another account and run the experiment and post the results. Personally I have never felt the need to utilize promoted listings and add to my fees and I don't want to increase prices to cover the promoted listing cost at the expense of a buyer who may have found it without the promotion. 

      The interesting thing about promoted listings as more and more seller utilize it levels the playing field back to where it was before there were any promoted listings. What value is there if 100% of sellers are using promoted listings?

[my-cottage-books-and-antiques]

A little more on why I use PLS:

I've been using it since ebay first offered it. Why?

1. It is easy and quick to use (at least as I use it). It if took a long time to set up, I might reconsider.

2. I sell almost exclusively long tail (some very long tail) one offs, so "testing" isn't very practical. 

3. Because I sell mostly long tail, many of my items don't have much competition for the first page of search results (if the buyer is conducting a narrow enough search), so PLS providing better placement on the front page is not really an inducement. However, the fact that ebay shows my items on other pages IS an inducement, since I suspect (better traffic reporting would help here) that many of my PL sales are a result of that placement....some things are priced low enough that they can be impulse buys if shown on another page. 

4. Most of my items have strong margins. usually my prices provide good wiggle room...I can use a reasonable PL rate and still have a good margin, and can accept offers, run sales etc. Yes, it cuts into the margin , but , for me, I'd rather lose a little margin and get some sales velocity (especially since long tail items, by their very nature, often take a long time to sell. At the right PL rate, that's a definite win.

Disclaimer: These factors apply to MY business. A seller working on tighter margins, or with different types of merchandise, less concern about velocity, etc, is likely to have a different view. Do what works for you.

[meme6253]

But How do you get Good Visibility Without It??

[meme6253]

How do you get good visibility with such a low ad rate?

[meme6253]

Thanks!, Makes Sense!, I just keep wondering how to get great visibility without using it or lowering the ad rate, Because it is being stressed so highly to promote

[dbfolks166mt]

     I probably don't but when I am looking for  something to buy on eBay, which is seldom, I do a search for the item and display the results with price + shipping lowest first. I care less whether it is promoted or not. I will scroll through the results to make sure something is not amiss but generally the list is ordered correctly. 

     As far as visibility I never really worried about it. Buyers seem to find my items without too much trouble. I suspect a lot of them are using bot software to automatically search for and notify them when a particular item comes up as I often have views and watchers within minutes of posting a listing. 

     I am also diversified across multiple forums and platforms where I actually sell about 70-80% of my items because I can list them considerably cheaper since the fees are lower or there are no fees. I use several local platforms that are P2P exchange that do not involve shipping cost and the risk of returns and/or scams is pretty much 0.