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.

flyingmvp · ‎09-21-2021

@frugality_inc wrote:
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.

Nǐ hǎo. 👨‍🔬

The CEO and his peons couldn't care less about the future of Ebay, they will move on to the next company before their short term gains will take a dive, the next CEO will eat what's left of the cake and move on as well.

Buyers are leaving Ebay (according to Ebay report) sellers will follow.

bauble-babes · ‎09-21-2021

I see my Promoted Listing Impressions started tanking about the time this new horror went into affect. Did an Art Deco Necklace search and none of mine showed on the first 2 pages OR in any of the "See Similar" photos and used to see several of mine in those spots. When viewing the see similar, I can also tell which sellers have jumped on board the new program as the vast majority are their items. Off to cancel ALL promotions since my items aren't really being promoted anymore...sickening.

gjs_16 · ‎09-21-2021

Let me clear something up here, if I may...

My take on the PPC market is that it's for people who have more money than sense.

And that will take care of itself, just let it play itself out, you may consider other venues of course but I think it's just a blip on the radar... It may take weeks and months of our sales tanking but trust me, some folks will be out of business as a direct result of this PPC thing and then the sales will have no choice but to return to those of us who just sat tight. And yes there is a possibility a few people will get very rich as a result, but that will only be at the expense of others...

So grab the popcorn, sit back and enjoy the show.

my-cottage-books-and-antiques · ‎09-21-2021

@bauble-babes I'm not familiar with what you sell, but I don't really see how PLA would have this effect?....PLA fills only ONE slot---the top slot on the search page.... IF people have bid on the keywords in your search. I'm not doubting what you are saying about your items in search....but I don't see how this would cause that to happen.

monster-deals · ‎09-21-2021

Promoted listings is a manipulated search, race to the bottom.

I can't understand why anyone would use it.

frugality_inc · ‎09-21-2021

While that may be true for some sellers that do not know their numbers, I see a lot of sellers that use slower shipping methods without tracking to cut costs to be able to pay for the higher promoted listing fee.

eBay used to reward sellers for good service, now that is ignored. eBay shows no signs of stopping. Destroying the quality of the platform all for the short term benefit of more profit per dollar of revenue on the site for eBay. Zero value for buyers.

tidbits4u2 · ‎09-23-2021

The sad part about all this, is eBay keeps squeezing the sellers, and does absolutely nothing to promote their site, watch TV for 2 hours and you will see atleast one amazon commercial, eBay needs to step up and bring buyers back instead of figuring out how to keep squeezing its sellers, Cmon eBay all I see is amazon this and amazon that, never eBay anything, I dont shop on amazon but I have to be honest, I see so much amazon that I have recently started shopping there. if we dont have the buyers how can you keep raising fee's, do something to bring back the buyers, its simple logic. by not doing anything to bring back buyers shows eBay truly does not care about the future of eBay, as stated above walmart and Amazon will be the downfall of eBay. Buyers = revenue. BRING IN BUYERS

sextons-sweet-deals · ‎09-27-2021

As a seller and buyer, I'm not going to buy the first top listings in my search no matter what the selling price is!

As a buyer, your looking for something specific correct? Your going to do your research, your going to read the listing details, your going to look at all photos posted, and your going to ask questions if needed.

I feel that I bust my behind listing items. Providing photos, measurements, details, and history / details when applicable.

I could go on, but enough said.

take care everyone!

zamo-zuan · ‎09-27-2021

Most people on here expressed similar about Promoted Listings.

And then Wenig went on and first announced the Pay Per Click listing feature, claiming that sellers were "Begging" for it.

Yeah. We all knew the truth then, same as we do now. No sellers in their right mind were begging for this and they were already upset about having to pay for visibility to begin with.

zamo-zuan · ‎09-27-2021

@gjs_16 wrote:
Let me clear something up here, if I may...

My take on the PPC market is that it's for people who have more money than sense.
And that will take care of itself, just let it play itself out, you may consider other venues of course but I think it's just a blip on the radar... It may take weeks and months of our sales tanking but trust me, some folks will be out of business as a direct result of this PPC thing and then the sales will have no choice but to return to those of us who just sat tight. And yes there is a possibility a few people will get very rich as a result, but that will only be at the expense of others...
So grab the popcorn, sit back and enjoy the show.

This isn't the reality of how eBay works, though.

You can see what they did with PLS. If you don't invest how much they want you to, your impressions will plummet. Over the years as they added more and more to PL, we documented how things went.

At first, visibility dropped. To get that visibility back, you needed to spend 1%, or else your impressions were down.

Then you could spend 1%, and keep the impressions as high as before. So as of last year they changed it so 2%, 3%, or 4% depending on our categories.

At this time, if we spend under that rate, we would get barely any impressions. If we spent above that rate, our PL impressions shot up to be 2x our organic.

That's how eBay has changed. To where 2/3 of your visibility is through PL. If you don't invest in PL, you won't get those impressions.

This is the reality. We can say "we won't invest in PL while others go out of business" but that's not how eBay works. EBay has designed their systems to reduce your impressions unless you spend, period.

If you want to test it, try 1% at a time on all your items in a category. Once you hit maybe 3%, maybe 4%, you'll find that level that your PL impressions shoot up to 2x the organic.

If you price higher than that? They won't go up any more. If you price just 1% lower, your PL impressions drop to nearly nothing.

The only number that matters is figuring out the percentage that works.

monster-deals · ‎09-28-2021

All this garbage for a broken search engine.

Just pay someone to fix it so we can all get seen please.

How can this company get any more top heavy with bad ideas?

zamo-zuan · ‎09-28-2021

@monster-deals wrote:
All this garbage for a broken search engine.

Just pay someone to fix it so we can all get seen please.

How can this company get any more top heavy with bad ideas?

"All getting seen" isn't the goal of any of the forms of PL by their very design. Nor is getting the customers what they want.

As with most things in the corporate world, it's designed to give eBay more control and more faucets to profit.

frugality_inc · ‎09-28-2021

Absolutely disgraceful. I am seeing more and more of the same problems I described in 2019 when PLs were first rolled now but even worse now. Ship from China sellers filling the top of search results. <97% positive feedback, higher prices, slower shipping. Designing search results forcing buyer's to scroll down on both desktop and mobile just to see the top organic slots. All purposefully done.

Truly sad eBay continues to focus on sacrificing quality on this platform all to add a few percentage points to profit. All about enriching the executives for their stock option plans while destroying the last bit of value this platform has versus Amazon. Short term gains for long term pain.

eBay had many other options to boost profits, yet decided to take the short term destructive thinking route. These executives have proven themselves as incompetent leaders that know very little about how this site serves buyers and small business.

eBay executives consistently boast about being a "champion for small business", yet continue to destroy the foundation of this website that allowed small businesses to thrive.

I have experienced eBay backstabbing early managed payment sellers, assisting counterfeiters from China hurting our brands despite notice served on eBay, blatantly obvious throttling, rogue eBay associates damaging our eBay listings & account ... and now these promoted listings garbage since 2019. Champion for small business. All lies.

zamo-zuan · ‎09-28-2021

@frugality_inc wrote:

Absolutely disgraceful. I am seeing more and more of the same problems I described in 2019 when PLs were first rolled now but even worse now. Ship from China sellers filling the top of search results. <97% positive feedback, higher prices, slower shipping. Designing search results forcing buyer's to scroll down on both desktop and mobile just to see the top organic slots. All purposefully done.

Truly sad eBay continues to focus on sacrificing quality on this platform all to add a few percentage points to profit. All about enriching the executives for their stock option plans while destroying the last bit of value this platform has versus Amazon. Short term gains for long term pain.

eBay had many other options to boost profits, yet decided to take the short term destructive thinking route. These executives have proven themselves as incompetent leaders that know very little about how this site serves buyers and small business.

eBay executives consistently boast about being a "champion for small business", yet continue to destroy the foundation of this website that allowed small businesses to thrive.

I have experienced eBay backstabbing early managed payment sellers, assisting counterfeiters from China hurting our brands despite notice served on eBay, blatantly obvious throttling, rogue eBay associates damaging our eBay listings & account ... and now these promoted listings garbage since 2019. Champion for small business. All lies.

The sad part is they already went down this road, and they had already learned that it didn't work out well in the end.

I guess at this point, "new management" has to make the same mistakes, expecting a different result.

holsterworldusa · ‎09-29-2021

Totally agree! And I'm rather offended that I already pay eBay to list items, pay LOTS of fees, now I have to pay even more just to be SEEN? Kinda rude, eBay! My fees should be as good as another's fees, and I pay to be SEEN!