eBay

albany_sellers · ‎09-20-2021

At this stage I have decided to halt ALL promotions. No more promoted listings, period.

When it has sunk so low that we are now being asked to bid on keywords or be buried in the search results, it's time to rethink things and consider other avenues. I called it back when regular promoted listings were rolled out and said that this was just the start until something else came along like "super duper ultra mega major hyper uber promoted listings", and well, here it is.

You see, they knew something all along when promoted listings became a thing, and that is that eventually we would be promoting just to maintain what our sales were prior to promoted listings. eBay enjoys the extra fees and we all end up right where we started at while also "choosing" to promote. Now that everyone is promoted, apparently we need "super promotions" to be promoted over the regular promoted listings, so really, what is the point of bothering to even promote?

Repeat after me. When everyone is promoted, nobody is promoted. Go right ahead and try to compete with Promoted Listings Advanced and see how well that works out. Enjoy paying more and more just to get your listings seen.

I mean honestly, do quality listings even matter when you can just buy the top placement? Is it even worth it to have good photos, good descriptions and relevant keywords when someone else can just buy the spots?

My prediction, the search results are going to be a mess of low quality, irrelevant results that will serve to make eBay look like wish or alibaba. Buyers will get frustrated because what they want to find will be hidden from them in favor of purchased results. Sellers will get frustrated because doing a good job will be secondary to the people who pay to play, and many will leave for other platforms where they believe the playing deck is not as stacked against them.

For me personally, once my sales tank because of this, I will be taking the remainder of my listings elsewhere and double down somewhere else. There are a couple other places I have been watching and thinking about trying out, and this just might be the push I needed to do so.

vintage-camerastuff · ‎09-20-2021

As long as ebay sellers keep signing up for promoted listings and now promoted listings advanced everyone will continue to lose money except greedy ebay management and share holders. Ebay sellers cancel your promoted listing and stop the bleeding.

isaiah53-57 · ‎09-20-2021

@albany_sellers wrote:
At this stage I have decided to halt ALL promotions. No more promoted listings, period.

When it has sunk so low that we are now being asked to bid on keywords or be buried in the search results, it's time to rethink things and consider other avenues. I called it back when regular promoted listings were rolled out and said that this was just the start until something else came along like "super duper ultra mega major hyper uber promoted listings", and well, here it is.

I said the same thing and More - Posted a long negative critique of the program that in a nutshell said anyone who took part in "Premium Placements" (which was the original name for Promoted Listings) was putting the noose around their own neck... Putting Short Term Gain in front of Long Term Vision has always been the draw to the program and in that respect, the sellers here learned from the best - the ebay company itself...

I have never given a penny to promoted listings and I'll burn my 6 figure inventory before I ever do...

flyingmvp · ‎09-20-2021

@isaiah53-57 wrote:

I have never given a penny to promoted listings and I'll burn my 6 figure inventory before I ever do...

Hey, don't burn your inventory! just do what the rest of us are doing..

albany_sellers · ‎09-20-2021

Well when you are selling XYZ and refuse to pay to win, but 50 others will shovel money into pay per click, the results are fairly predictable.

isaiah53-57 · ‎09-20-2021

@albany_sellers wrote:
Well when you are selling XYZ and refuse to pay to win, but 50 others will shovel money into pay per click, the results are fairly predictable.

And there's the short term gain at the expense of long term vision - But I understand - Enough People bought into it with no thought of what they could be perpetuating over the long term - If that didnt happen, we wouldnt have Promoted listings 2.0 - We would have general, across-the-board price increases - we dont like them, but they are at least equitable for ALL users.

There are so many thing inherently wrong and immoral with this program - The program counts on sellers clawing and scratching their way over each other to get the next morsel - its inhumane - All the while they dig a deeper pit for themselves, not stopping to think for a moment that the more they use the program, the deeper the hole they are digging for themselves and everyone else - They look at it like a way to get ahead - and maybe it is over the short term, but look where we are now and where do you think this program is going to lead?....

Here's a kicker...If Everyone used Promoted Listing Like ebay would have it... you would have the same search placement as you had before you started using Promoted listings, only now you are paying 5 to 10% more in fees than you were -- But wait...cant have that -- gotta get an edge and take part in Promoted Listings 2.0 and again eventually end up with the same placement but now paying 10-15% more fees -- but wait, need more edge ...gotta use promoted listings 3.0.... and so on and so on and so on...

albany_sellers · ‎09-20-2021

That is exactly it and I think that is what was intended right from the start. Nobody can convince me that they do not already have 3.0 planned and ready to go as soon as the site is saturated with PLA listings. This is a losing game for sellers.

It's time to move the eggs from this basket into another, I ain't stupid and can see the writing on the wall. By this time next year, eBay will no longer be worth using, and I will have moved elsewhere.

kaikai_cresha89 · ‎09-20-2021

It is utterly ridiculous. I am still going to sell on Ebay but reading about this idiotic program in my messages inspired me for the 1st time to branch out to other sites. How greedy, inept, and out of touch can you get? They charge fees on shipping (when honestly if you buy labels through Ebay they could be honest, see what you pay and not charge that fee) they charge fees on sales tax! Now they want us to bid against each other for visibility. Enough is enough. Freaking ridiculous!

vintagecraze50 · ‎09-20-2021

Just read an article where some of the smaller sellers are backing out of AMZ even now becuase of how high the costs are getting to do business there. Competing for those slots and having to pay to be seen and just dog eat dog stuff. Really crazy.

vintagecraze50 · ‎09-20-2021

That’s correct. It really depends on how much competition you have for that product or products. That would be one big factor.

albany_sellers · ‎09-20-2021

It's not even just this one poor decision, it's this one on top of so many others that always seem to hurt us sellers somehow. It's how they always frame it in a way to try and make us believe it's for our benefit when it's absolutely not.

It's exhausting to be "helped" so much that you just want to create an escape plan or just throw it all away and go back to a 9-5 job instead. The worst part is that if they just left us alone and let us sell our stuff, they would make so much more money in the short term, and in the long term.

How many fantastic long time sellers are they going to run off just to show a short term profit that will never last? The more they run off, the more they have to keep reaching into the remaining seller's pockets to keep their shareholders at bay. This is a cycle that can't last much longer before it all folds up and there is nothing left to do to keep the shareholders happy.

What we need is a CEO who understands long term strategy and that knocking everything over just to appease a handful of people is unwise, but then again, by the time eBay is thrashed, that CEO is gone and it's not his or her problem.

They really need to just stop sending those surveys out asking our opinions, they are not listening. This is why I also quit eBay expressions, it's useless to try and influence things or offer advice to people who already have their minds made up.

chapeau-noir · ‎09-20-2021

@donsdetour wrote:
Hmm I see it as great trouble just on the idea of selling say brand names: or owned names and may violate owners rights....

This has happened to others....

Again: not so well thought out thing by eBay.....

The bidding is on keywords, which may include brand names, not selling them - it's not illegal because it's not physical product or intellectual property being sold, it's access. Etsy has been using a similar program for years, and now they've made it into a 'success penalty' where you HAVE to participate in it if you gross even as little as 10k a year (12%), 'leveraged' on their awesome broken search. I used to participate in a similar at Google.

I don't care for it because I know what can happen, having done this before - I'll give it a try but have a low threshold for acceptance at least for what I sell (I'm in the hypersaturated fashion category, but for the most part I don't sell hypersaturated brands, and I'm at a lower price point). I was fine with the plain PL Standard.

“The illegal we do immediately, the unconstitutional takes a little longer.” - Henry Kissinger

"Wherever law ends, tyranny begins" -John Locke

frugality_inc · ‎09-20-2021

I was very vocal on my stance against PL in 2019. Spent hours on the phone, many emails sent and forum posts created. @jordan_sweetnam even acknowledged my post for the AMA. Only thing they've done is added where below standard can't use PLs, designed the search results to require PLs for maximum visibility and now rolled out pay per click PLs.

https://community.ebay.com/t5/Ask-Me-Anything-Jordan-Sweetnam/Promoted-Listings-are-Ruining-Quality-...

"It's something I saw pretty quickly after my return... great sellers (top rated, amazing feedback, great prices) were ranking below sellers with 0 (!) feedback or (even worse) feedback scores of 94%, 96%, etc...

I think promoted listings is great tool for sellers when used correctly. Have a new product and want to have it rank up in search quickly? Use PL. But if you are new to the platform and haven't proven that you can deliver the buyer experiences of our best sellers it doesn't make any sense to have those items appear at the top. I certainly *do not* want someone taking $s out of shipping faster or packing better to invest in paying for a promoted listing placement instead.

Conversations on this topic are underway - I can't commit to a specific date or change - but don't be surprised to see us testing some things in the new year and announcing changes by Q2. "

Nice seeing promoted listing advanced sellers in the top slot shipping from CHINA. Nǐ hǎo.

That aged well didn't it? This just shows how incompetent management is at eBay. Clearly disconnected from reality.

If you haven't diversified by now, you may want to. eBay is no longer our marketplace of choice as of Summer 2021. Amazon sells 4x worth with only 11% of the SKUs vs. full catalog on eBay. Cheaper to sell on Amazon vs. eBay for our almost all of our SKUs. Walmart will overtake our eBay sales next year at this pace.

eBay must abuse service metrics and promoted listings to fund the life rafts for the sinking ship.

Truly sad the path management has taken this website. Began on this website in 2017 with $800 and first 7-figure year on eBay alone was 2019. Fees are now 60% higher even before promoted listings. PLs are just a way for eBay to raise fees. Little does eBay understand, they remove the price competitiveness eBay has had versus other websites for numerous years.

You must pay for promoted listings if you want to be seen by 100% of buyers for a given search term. Have the top organic search? Buyers must scroll down on both desktop and mobile app just to see your listing. Meanwhile you get beat by a 93% positive feedback seller that ships with no tracking/ships slowly/ships from another country and has a higher price than you. How nice.

Promoted listings offer zero benefit to the buyer. eBay continues to invest in programs that devalue this site and eradicate the long standing core competencies. One day, all of this short term thinking by management will catch up to them.

https://www.marketplacepulse.com/articles/ebays-plan-is-more-ads

"Thus eBay has found a short-term plan to grow revenue but still has no answers for declining market share."

Now it seems like people are finally catching on... Seeing more and more new threads every day. About time.

virtueimportant · ‎09-21-2021

Thanks for summing up exactly how I also feel.

Not sure if you heard about Tiffany & Co. ordering hundreds of "Tiffany" items from eBay and discovering that 70% were counterfeit. They took them to court and lost, then on appeal Tiffany lost again and it was decided that eBay should not be held responsible for having to police their own platform.

I hope one day one a competing platform grows into a simple replacement for us and eBay finally reaps what they sow.

donsdetour · ‎09-21-2021

@albany_sellers wrote:
Well when you are selling XYZ and refuse to pay to win, but 50 others will shovel money into pay per click, the results are fairly predictable.

Yep there cost are higher and will have to charge more;

Now: if that search worked such would be to the cheaper seller.