Finally have Sales/but had to take PLs (Promoted Std) to 10-12% for ALL listings to Make it Happen

[katzrul15]

The title really says it all.

Have sales, but my PL percentages are killing me.  Played with it over and over on percentages and when I lower then to even 8%, sales stop.  At the 10-12% range, we have consistent sales.

Really dreading then the FALL update, additional fees and USPS increases.  Not certain how we (us) are going to be able to do this and remain profitable overall??  Anyone else concerned about this?

[royalsage]

Yes, I'm concerned about it too. It's like having a friendly pet dog that suddenly turns on you. 

[htownmma]

Promotes listings have definitely helped get views and sales but the cost can get way up there. Does anyone know much about the new advanced promoted listings, received offer from Ebay today on the advanced beta.. 

[skeletonstore]

I've certainly played with promotions and remember finding a few years ago I had to go to 33% to get sales. I don't know how many listings you have available or anyway of knowing if your store is "healthy" according to my own interpretation of health but promotions have many pitfalls.  Okay so you're show more but what does that actually mean?  As noted on these boards customers get blanked off at having to scroll past what they deem to be unrelated content and may even learn to acquire a certain amount of disdain for  your very existence.  When you consider most people are on phones,  4 listings is like a phone the size of a large loaf of bread to scroll past.  So you've already blanked them off.  You're blanking yourself off with free shipping and less profits if not losses so you raise your price and everyone insists you have to accept offers,  even ebay,  and if you turn them off ebay will go Regan from the Exorcist on you but you're still going to get offers to send and big brother ebay is watching so you send offers....finally you raise prices and you get MORE offers but now your 27% commission is on $7 not $10.  The customer doesn't know you or anything about your problems.  They're at the melon market bartering with you.  Oh and if they should happen to click your promotion at 12% and you lower it to 6% and they come back.  You're paying 12%.  Rather convoluted but that's ebay.  Your best promo if you can manage it is to list regularly.  Ebay doesn't throw cookies to people who list some things and wait for sales.  They throw them rat poisoning.  Really the algorithm considers you to be a pest.  The idea is to have several dozen or more items refreshing every day.  That's your best promo but only if you have that many items to list.  You definitely don't want 1500 items listed on the same day. In this example you want 50 listed a day,  for coverage.  

[skeletonstore]

Another thing about promotional rates that may alarm some people is if your sell thru rate is like 10, 12 or even 33% like mine just was it makes you think your products or some of your products are undervalued by giving all that coin away just to create a sale. Your items aren't selling because they're not being seen.  Why are items not being seen?  Your store is not in good health.  You're not active enough.  Partially it has something to do with if you have anything interesting to sell.  I could sell way more items if my store was healthy. I can definitely create new interesting items , which is an advantage over someone who has to find them.  However it takes capital to establish a niche market.  That's why I think for any kind of store,  activity is your best promo.  I've even found that titles and descriptions are useless compared to activity.  Promos are useless without activity.  You can't just edit your listings.  You have to list. All you need is a picture and a price.  The title and description could be BTJFJDHJGDFj.  It's quite possible to sell without promos if you can become "healthy" according to the ebay doctor.  

[ducks2k]

@skeletonstore   Interesting - the several dozen was the logic I came up with for my 5,000 items.  too many frequent relists get quickly scanned past, but failing to end/newlist has everything getting less and less visible.  Even the cheapest (2%) PLS gets my stuff shown on a lot of searches/items and the cost is very minimal.  As far as I can tell, genuine "promoted" sales are around 5-10% for me.  More than half of the ones eBay claims as "promoted" are just because someone with an organic search just opted to click on a promotion link, rather than go back to his search, or my store.  For my specialty, promotions are not a big factor in sales.

[skeletonstore]

Can one even accurately sandbox if promos are even being shown in relative areas?  I see clicks and impressions.  I can go to the category I listed the items in and can see my items sometimes with a sponsored label but what does that even mean?  I'm hurting my own ctr?  Am I only seeing it because I may have clicked on my own listing before or searched for it?  If your rate is 12% and you never see your listings in the top 4 positions,  does that mean it's too low or is what ebay's showing you tailored to you?  It can all get really ridiculous.  I'm gonna go try my own promo experiment with 1 throw away item.  Let's see if I get any impressions or clicks or just get lost in the shuffle.  

[muchloveria_6]

And on top of all that, scamming customers more and more. Nope, eBay refuses to listen to us loyal sellers for years and now it's a sinking ship. They just lost 22.1 billion this past year alone and they think the answer is to allow fraud, charge higher fees and not work with USPS to lower shipping costs. Basically I'm just going to try to find a better company and sell the stuff I have on here and then bounce. At least with other companies, I'll be better protected. eBay doesn't care about their sellers, they side with the customer so much and that is pretty obvious that they may be the customer even. No joke. They know with the cost of shipping, a lot of the time it's better to just refund and there's too many ways that a product isn't returned so your out product and money! It's ridiculous. I've never seen any company have this many complaints from their sellers. AliExpress protects their sellers better than this!

[zamo-zuan]

---

@htownmma wrote:

Promotes listings have definitely helped get views and sales but the cost can get way up there. Does anyone know much about the new advanced promoted listings, received offer from Ebay today on the advanced beta.. 

---

You can open the PLA tool to see the rates its giving for keywords.

The frustrating thing about PLA is the keywords are obviously made up prices. Unless you're investing > 50% of the asking price, you won't even get a single impression (not even later in the day when other sellers have hit their daily limit OR on items without PLA competition).

Try making up a keyword of your own. It'll typically claim between $1-$3 PER CLICK for a 100% MADE UP KEYWORD. 

You can't really trust eBay with PLA. We have played with it awhile for now but it just leads to having to blacklist words because it's advertising car parts as boat parts, and haven't gotten a single sale resulting from it.

[simply-the-best-for-you]

I've never had to promote anywhere near 33% & I sell in the most saturated category on the site.  Also, the majority of my buyers do not shop on phones.  It depends on your category. 

[katzrul15]

---

@zamo-zuan wrote:

---

@katzrul15 wrote:

@zamo-zuan 

That is really interesting - I am going to screen-shoot mine for a few days and compare.

Any idea "why" the data is evidently skewed to begin with and then corrects/reverts? 

---

The only things that seem to make sense is either the numbers we're being given are estimates, or being adjusted afterwards. Or both.

I guess another option could be that they're totally made up lol, but I don't think it's fair to entertain that one without evidence. (Although I will be 100% transparent that the only reason it's even considered is that eBay has lost so much trust by having their PLS/PLA "peer/recommended" numbers being completely made up).

Taking daily screenshots of the traffic pages is a great thing to do, not just for monitoring issues but you could also notice trends and it's useful stat-keeping. Whenever it seems like there's issues going on, I try to do it daily. For major issues, sometimes multiple times daily.

---

@zamo-zuan 

I have been tracking mine since the 19th.  Unfortunately, you are correct - they do reset/revise.  This is concerning to me.  On several levels.😵‍💫

[katzrul15]

---

@htownmma wrote:

Promotes listings have definitely helped get views and sales but the cost can get way up there. Does anyone know much about the new advanced promoted listings, received offer from Ebay today on the advanced beta.. 

---

@htownmma 

Recd the offer also - not sure what to think/proceed.

[zamo-zuan]

I can definitely relate.  I started tracking statistics in 2018 due to issues we had and I've had that concern for years now, and more and more concerns have just built up and been added to the list after seeing so many inconsistencies/glitches/etc.

It sometimes feels like eBay has slowly been tumbling down the steps and it's having a snowball effect, lol. 

[skeletonstore]

Been several hours.  I changed all my promotions to 12.1%(in case I had to outbid someone ha!), I even added a test listing promoted at 50%.  For the day I have 12 clicks and 5700 depressions(well it it to me,  if only 1% bought something i'd be feeling much less depressed).  Some of that came from 3 A.M. till 11 A.M. or whenever.  It's not 8 o'clock EST but really I'm not seeing anything.  50 of my items are in a category that no longer exists. The renamed sections are only for chinese sellers.  Only they use such terms.  Go on alibaba or any other dropshipping distribution sit in the farest and you will see they don't use the word HALLOWEEN.  Talking to Filipino reps over the years, they can't even pronounce the word.  It's a total tongue tie.  Most people are listing Halloween goods in "seasonal figurines".  I really don't have a category anymore. Promos are a waste of time. 

[valueaddedresource]

Good news sellers from eBay Open, coming soon PLA will also have dedicated spots in middle and bottom of search too!

[my-cottage-books-and-antiques]

@valueaddedresource 

Oh, Great Googly Moogly! But....it was pretty much inevitable.