Ebay Promoted Listings Suggest Rate is Higher for Old Inventory

[otkhaven]

Has anyone else noticed this?  I've recently started going through old listings fixing mistakes, cleaning up the titles and descriptions and noticed suggested ad rates were pretty high.  Thought it must just be the most fresh suggested rates based on everything.

But then I came across an old listing for a pair of Free People jeans.  2 views in the past 30 days and 1 watcher.  Once I fixed all the mistakes in the listing and made it to the promoted section, it was suggesting 15.5% ad rate!  None of the other jeans I created new listings for today were anywhere near that.

I experimented:  "Sell Similar" gave the exact same result for suggested ad rate.  15.5%.  So instead, I created a brand new listing from a template.  Inserted the exact same pics.  Copied all the exact same information in item specifics.  Copy and pasted title, condition and description.  Same price, same shipping, same everything.  Identical listing.  But the brand new listing is only suggesting 8.5% ad rate.  Both listings were using the same promotion campaign as well.

The only difference I can see are, the original listing had 2 views, 1 watcher and had been up there for a few months.  Has ebay mentioned this somewhere and I just missed it, or are they squeezing more money from ads out of old inventory?

[mam98031]

If I used Ebay's suggested price for my items when I'm creating a listing, I'd go broke in no time.  And way too often they are NOT comparing what I'm selling to a like product.

[bill.purvis2012]

Here's my question on this. When you end a listing and put it back in as "Sell Similar" it gets a new item number. Doesn't the Ebay algorithm think it's a brand new listing? I thought it did. Shouldn't it see it the same as the brand new listing you did?  I don't see why it would treat it any differently. Your thoughts?

[my-cottage-books-and-antiques]

@bill.purvis2012 Here's my question on this. When you end a listing and put it back in as "Sell Similar" it gets a new item number.

           Yes, it gets a brand new item ID number.

Doesn't the Ebay algorithm think it's a brand new listing? I thought it did. Shouldn't it see it the same as the brand new listing you did?  I don't see why it would treat it any differently. Your thoughts?

               I believe last year at ebay Open an ebay exec said that ebay's algo now has the ability to identify old listings as old even though they've been given a new number. I don't have time this AM to try to confirm that.

[otkhaven]

My understanding of "Sell Similar" is pretty much as yours is.  But I've heard mention of what @my-cottage-books-and-antiques  is saying about the algo detecting old listings.  I had a feeling Sell Similar was going to respond this way.

So that's got me wondering if you truly get a temporary boost from ending and selling similar at all.  If the algo can detect this use to be an old listing, is it sending it any new traffic?  Or is it being throttled because it's still old?

I think it's more than likely any positive action we see when we end something and sell similar is purely because the item can now be seen on the first page by customers who sort by "newly listed".

[b86fiero]

I don't know if this is similar to what you experienced but ...

Example:  I sell kitchen towel sets and use promoted listings.  eBay shows me different suggested percentages depending on whether I am creating a single listing or creating a new PL campaign with multiple listings. Suggested percentages range from 8% to 15.5% for a set of two towels. Sets of three get a different suggested rate and sets of four an even different rate.  Brand does not seem to generate a consistent rate suggestion nor does theme (owls, dogs, floral, holiday, etc.) nor does the day or date the listing was created.

I though perhaps the percentages changed due to the quantity of competing listings active on the date created and my listing went live.   

When I view my active inventory listings I see my current rate and often a different eBay suggested rate.

Another great eBay mystery!

[luckythewinner]

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@otkhaven wrote:

Has ebay mentioned this somewhere and I just missed it, or are they squeezing more money from ads out of old inventory?

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I do not think eBay gives out the algorithm they use for setting suggested rates, and I suspect it changes all the time.

That aside ...

I am not surprised at all that eBay would suggest a higher ad rate for a stale inventory item that has already proven it will not sell quickly. That seems like common sense.

[redlinear]

I would assume that eBay knows it's an older listing and are encouraging you to promote it at a higher percentage in order to sell.
"Hey, your stuff didn't sell at 0%.  It'd didn't sell at 8%.  Why don't you try 15%?"  (that's my guess)

[prepping2survive]

eBay is competing with Amazon and pitting Sellers against each other. It's a bit disgusting and in my opinion a great way to steer away allot of people from selling on eBay.

[mr_lincoln]

@otkhaven   Not sure if I posted on this thread before or not, rather busy to check but I noticed eBay over doubled the "Trending" rates on PLS ... like magic.  I am of the opinion that the rates are not real, they are just a ploy to get Sellers to offer higher rates so the FVFs wind up being more per sale thus cutting into the Seller's margin while the venue benefits.

With the advent of PLA, Views counting change, etc sale have gone in reverse.  In the last 14 months only ONE month has set a new sales dollar record so there is NO growth happening for my account.  I have a master spreadsheet that shows every month since I started selling with the number of orders and total ITEM sold amounts ... currently May is running way behind and if this weekend it doesn't improve it could be the worst sales month since May of 2018 ... yep, the last time sales were this low was 7 years ago.

When 30% or more of a Seller's items have 0 -1 View in the last 30 days you know something is wrong and an even lower % have more than 10 Views.  I am sure PLA has thrown the search algorithms for a loop since eBay will give Sellers who are PRE-paying their AD fees precedence in Search results ... while that may be a good program for commodities it is not suited for Collectibles (what I sell in).  

My PLS campaigns in 2022 were absolutely the worst, had one good one this year in 1st Quarter then my 2nd Quarter one did horrible like last year.  

Sellers who have been doing this for a while notice significant changes ... and many of us have ... and of course it is all out of our control.  

[otkhaven]

@mr_lincoln  You've posted on this thread a few times actually 🙂  But yeah, the original thread was me noticing that ending an item and selling similar retained the old items much higher suggest rate vs creating a brand new listing for the exact same item, photos and all.  Creating a brand new listing for that item, even using the same photos suggested a much lower rate.  On the sold similar listing, the suggested rate for the old items I was experimenting with were around 15%.  Creating a brand new listing, not changing anything at all, the suggested rate was coming in around 8.5% at the time.

With recent changes, I noticed immediately that they upped the "suggested" rate.  It went into effect for me as soon as they changed the design of the promoted section on the draft page.

Not a gradual change either.  Immediate.  Like Day 1 almost all of my clothing is suggesting between 8-8.5%.  Day 2 the promoted section now looks more fancy in the template and all "suggested" rates are 10-10.5%.

That's not from other sellers slowly increasing and everyone raising the bar higher and higher against each other.  That was literally a switch in something behind the scenes.

Anyway, my rants done. 🙂  I've set a limit on how high I'm willing to go.  Sales have dropped.  We'll see how it plays out.  Either it's a coincidence and I'll see a pick up down the road or it's not a coincidence and I'll have to determine if I'm willing to increase the % further or explore other avenues.  Seems like not much else can be done in regards to it.

[pls-consignments]

"...I don't use  promoted listings and..."

Just curious, have you seen any drop in sales since Promoted Listings has taken over?

[dhbookds]

Thanks for the observation/proof.........so often we get  "this is what happens" posts with no real examples, so your post is a breath of fresh air to me.....

[luckythewinner]

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@prepping2survive wrote:

eBay is competing with Amazon and pitting Sellers against each other. It's a bit disgusting and in my opinion a great way to steer away allot of people from selling on eBay.

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ROTFL.

Pitting sellers against each other?

Isn't that pretty much the definition of an economy?

[mr_lincoln]

@otkhaven   LOL!  I've posted on quite a few threads so sometimes when I am busy I forget ... You are not alone noticing the immediate increase in suggested (trending) rates ... another Seller and I have been discussing this in PMs for quite some time.  And what is interesting is we are in totally different categories and sell nothing similar at all on our accounts.  

eBay's cash flow is like a Parking Lot ... the only way to make more money is to raise the parking rates ... 

[blurryrobot]

Very interesting! Try this with a few more items and see if it's consistent at all.  I'll try it too. 

Of course Ebay knows very well that many people go with the "suggested" rate, and that many people also pay less attention to what's going on with older listings.  A perfect opportunity for them to do something shady like this. 

I use fixed rates for everything so I'd never have noticed this. 

This is also interesting to me because you used the same photos, yet Ebay clearly didn't recognize it as the old listing.  I have suspected for a while, based on some experiments, that Ebay uses photo data to recognize relisted items.  But I was never sure whether they were recognizing it based on the photo's own data, or if they were tagging the photos with some additional data and looking for the tag.