eBay

wastingtime101 · ‎02-28-2023

https://www.ebayads.com/2023/02/15/seller-announcement-promoted-listings-standard-fees-are-changing/

What’s changing?

As we continue working to help make your ads more engaging and helpful for buyers, we will be expanding our definition of a click for Standard and Advanced ads to include interactions with new features and functionality of your ads. In addition to when a buyer clicks through to your listing page, we will now include when a buyer clicks on the heart icon to add an item to their watchlist from a Promoted Listing.
We will be expanding what we qualify and report as an Attributed Sale for Promoted Listings Standard to include when a buyer clicks on one of your Standard ads and then purchases any of your Promoted Listings Standard items within 30 days.
In anticipation of upcoming product launches, we have clarified that certain account optimization features (e.g., dynamic bidding) may be managed through your account settings. Please stay tuned for announcements on when these will be available to you.

nuclearomen · ‎03-07-2023

@my-cottage-books-and-antiques from what I read yeah, that's the case, but since the erased that info page and replaced it, can't find what i read previous of it... so maybe your right, maybe not, in the end if it's promoted, you'll be charged PL fee. Don't much care what they say in all these little exceptions... bottom line is that they are doing this as another money grab, which they make millions extra fees on, if it's promoted you will be charged PL fee, no matter if viewed normal or not, favorite something in PL campaign and they buy be charged the PL fee... it's already this way 80-90% of the time of sale anyways (see my sales above I posted, all but 2 were PL). IF one doesn't promote everything or only small amount of listings then yeah, good chance no PL fee, IF you promote everything or most and deal in the same category the odds of that PL fee being attached to sales will be all and most likely. In the end, like said at start of this thread, doesn't matter cause I expect everything to have the PL fee attached and my prices are made out for it.

The great truth is there isn't one
And it only gets worse since that conclusion...
...There is something about the rigid posture of a proper, authentic blind
As if extended arms reached to pass his blindness onto others.

my-cottage-books-and-antiques · ‎03-07-2023

@simply-the-best-for-you You put ALL your listings in your campaign. The graph then shows you all of those listings when the campaign is ACTIVE. When your campaign ends, how many listings are still active? NONE. The campaign is over, and so there are NO listings to show----Sponsored or Organic. To prove it, end your campaign and don't start a new one for at least a full day or two.....both lines will flatline.

It would be a lot easier to understand this if ebay did not say Promoted and Organic, because Organic can mean two different things : a listing that is NOT in a campaign, OR a listing that IS in the campaign but not shown as Sponsored. It would be better if the graph said Sponsored and Non-Sponsored, and left the term Organic ONLY for listings that are not in a campaign.

I suspect your problem is, you assume that once you end the campaign, the PLS graph should continue to show organic listings ...but it should NOT. Again, if there is no campaign, there are NO listings to show.

nuclearomen · ‎03-07-2023

@butterflyacres wrote:
My question is: If I end my item, will I still be charged the promotion fee? And also, what if I end it, and relist it without the promotion, will I still be charged if it sells in 30 days?

if you end listing then no, if make new listing and don't enter it into campaign then no fee.

The great truth is there isn't one
And it only gets worse since that conclusion...
...There is something about the rigid posture of a proper, authentic blind
As if extended arms reached to pass his blindness onto others.

simply-the-best-for-you · ‎03-07-2023

@my-cottage-books-and-antiques wrote:
@simply-the-best-for-you You put ALL your listings in your campaign. The graph then shows you all of those listings when the campaign is ACTIVE. When your campaign ends, how many listings are still active? NONE. The campaign is over, and so there are NO listings to show----Sponsored or Organic. To prove it, end your campaign and don't start a new one for at least a full day or two.....both lines will flatline.

It would be a lot easier to understand this if ebay did not say Promoted and Organic, because Organic can mean two different things : a listing that is NOT in a campaign, OR a listing that IS in the campaign but not shown as Sponsored. It would be better if the graph said Sponsored and Non-Sponsored, and left the term Organic ONLY for listings that are not in a campaign.

I suspect your problem is, you assume that once you end the campaign, the PLS graph should continue to show organic listings ...but it should NOT. Again, if there is no campaign, there are NO listings to show.

@my-cottage-books-and-antiques OK, thank you for the explanation. Yeah, I think the last paragraph nails it, especially since the Graph still shows. I mean, really if there's no campaign, then there s/b no graph LOL. I still need to sit with this in my brain for awhile, but paragraph 2 explains it well. There are a lot of places where eBay's wording could be improved. Like Send Offers - Sent. Why not just call it Sent Offers LOL.

Thanks for taking the time to explain it so well!

This one goes to Eleven - Nigel Tufnel

Simply-the-best-for-you Volunteer Community Mentor
eBay Seller since 1996

zamo-zuan · ‎03-07-2023

@simply-the-best-for-you wrote:
@zamo-zuan wrote:
I just want to clarify that if you ended a campaign, that can be what you are seeing there. Only the traffic for listings in a promotion show up on that page - hence why @my-cottage-books-and-antiques had mentioned it might be normal and the "traffic page" might be showing Organic views still.

The promotions page shows only the traffic for listings contained in a promotion. This means lets say you had 1000/1000 listings promoted, then you ended 500 of those promotions, now only 500/1000 are promoted. The traffic understandably drops in that case, as 500 of those listings will no longer be measured.

With that said, the reason I find our traffic page so alarming when the Organic drops is because we didn't actually end the promos, all we did was lower the rates. So all of our listings are still in a promotion (and still being measured by that page) yet the organic still drops - this is a sign that the investment of our PL also lowers organic.

This happens to some others, but I don't know the exact reason why this doesn't happen to everyone. Might be because of category or overall traffic, or that eBay has "tested" things on our store before others.

I'm in agreement with what you mention about not knowing exactly what you're paying for. In addition to that, you can't accurately estimate how much is going to be spent and have to overshoot it when trying to calculate profit margin. It makes eBay more volatile, and the volatility is already the worst part about selling here.
@zamo-zuan OK, but in my case, as I stated earlier, ALL my items are Promoted. I end a campaign, so I get a big dip in my PL bar. That part makes sense to me. But the corresponding smaller dip (but a dip nevertheless) in my Organic bar doesn't make sense to me. The organic views to all my listings that are in the campaign (which is everything), should not change. I don't think anyway. I admit, this is confusing to me & it's still early for me, so maybe I'm just not getting this.

In regards to your comment about decreasing the percentage, just curious approx what percentage it needs to be, in order for you to notice the Organic dip? I frequently change by 1% & haven't noticed anything, but maybe that's not enough to notice or maybe I'm not one who sees it regardless.

So for example, let's say 1000 listings all get 2 promoted and 1 organic impression a day. Which would be 2000 promoted 1000 organic.

If 500 of those listings are ended, now the promoted traffic for those 500 listings would be 1000 promoted 500 organic.

You might be getting organic impressions for items that are NOT currently promoted (for the ones that were ended) but those won't show up on the promo page and would only show on the traffic page.

Regarding the percentage, in the graphs we took items from 3-4% and dropped them to 2% (our entire inventory 2%) and we saw the drop. Prior to that, when 1% was allowed, we saw the same thing happen when dropping to 1%.

It seems for us, there's a requirement to have a substantial percentage of our items to be 3-4% or else we see a drop. It's almost like a switch as well - meaning if we find that sweet spot our switch is "on" and our impressions we normal. If we invest MORE than 4% it does nothing - the switch is already "on" and can't be "more on". And if we incrementally decrease, it'll be the same as it is now, or else a huge drop when the switch turns "off".

Hope that makes sense and please let me know if any other questions!

zamo-zuan · ‎03-07-2023

@simply-the-best-for-you wrote:
@my-cottage-books-and-antiques wrote:
@simply-the-best-for-you You put ALL your listings in your campaign. The graph then shows you all of those listings when the campaign is ACTIVE. When your campaign ends, how many listings are still active? NONE. The campaign is over, and so there are NO listings to show----Sponsored or Organic. To prove it, end your campaign and don't start a new one for at least a full day or two.....both lines will flatline.

It would be a lot easier to understand this if ebay did not say Promoted and Organic, because Organic can mean two different things : a listing that is NOT in a campaign, OR a listing that IS in the campaign but not shown as Sponsored. It would be better if the graph said Sponsored and Non-Sponsored, and left the term Organic ONLY for listings that are not in a campaign.

I suspect your problem is, you assume that once you end the campaign, the PLS graph should continue to show organic listings ...but it should NOT. Again, if there is no campaign, there are NO listings to show.

@my-cottage-books-and-antiques OK, thank you for the explanation. Yeah, I think the last paragraph nails it, especially since the Graph still shows. I mean, really if there's no campaign, then there s/b no graph LOL. I still need to sit with this in my brain for awhile, but paragraph 2 explains it well. There are a lot of places where eBay's wording could be improved. Like Send Offers - Sent. Why not just call it Sent Offers LOL.

Thanks for taking the time to explain it so well!

I didn't notice he already explained it for ya when I made the post. Glad you understand now!

EBay's wording makes it even more confusing when it says "Organic Impression (Promoted)" on the Ad Dashboard, lol.

This weird calculation was also an indicator of something being amiss, as we have always promoted 100% of our listings, and in some periods the traffic page and ad page were significantly different, with the traffic page somehow being lower at times, which just doesn't make sense, lol.

This also makes the behavior observed then Promoted Impressions were not showing up be really suspicious. The traffic page & ad page weren't seeing the Promoted Impressions, but all the Promoted Views somehow turned in to Organic Views, and if the traffic is truly being counted on the traffic page, this shouldn't be possible.

simply-the-best-for-you · ‎03-07-2023

@zamo-zuan Thank you, that does help. I just lowered my % by 1%, right now, as of the date/time stamp on this post. I'll make a note to check back in 2 days & show my chart.

This one goes to Eleven - Nigel Tufnel

Simply-the-best-for-you Volunteer Community Mentor
eBay Seller since 1996

simply-the-best-for-you · ‎03-09-2023

@zamo-zuan Here you go, as promised, my chart a little over 48hrs after I lowered my PL rate by 1%. No signifcant difference & in fact on 3/8, my Organic impressions are actually UP a bit. The dip at the end is just b/c today is only 1/2 over. I only went down the 1%, but there is essentially no difference between the 6th (pre-change) & the 9th (2 days post change). The variances are neglible, plus or minus.

This one goes to Eleven - Nigel Tufnel

Simply-the-best-for-you Volunteer Community Mentor
eBay Seller since 1996

wastingtime101 · ‎03-09-2023

@butterflyacres wrote:
My question is: If I end my item, will I still be charged the promotion fee? And also, what if I end it, and relist it without the promotion, will I still be charged if it sells in 30 days?

No fee if you end the listings @butterflyacres before they sell and relist without promoting them. You'll have to de-select the PL ad rate before you post them because the original listing was promoted so that field will be filled in by default.

GLORIOUS!

movieman630 · ‎03-10-2023

So all I see is that I can no longer promote listings when I list them? You removed the most convenient way for someone to promote an item and you think that's going to make people promote more?

Look, keep it simple. Stop changing things that aren't broken. I'm listing a lot. Now I don't know if they're promoted anymore or not because when I update the listings I can't work on the promotion rate. You want me to do it in batches?

My PL impressions started dropping when you rolled out this "advanced PL beta" on me. How is this making you more money? How is suddenly hurting my performance benefiting you? We had a good thing going when I could work on the promotions within the listings themselves. Now, I don't know what you're doing. I can't keep up. Why bother.

my-cottage-books-and-antiques · ‎03-10-2023

@movieman630 I'm not sure I'm following. Your post has nothing to do with the Announced changes (which take effect March 30th). And your post mentions "advanced PL beta." What is that? Are you talking about Promoted Listings Advanced (The pay per click model), as opposed to Promoted Listings Standard (the pay per sale model)?

movieman630 · ‎03-10-2023

All I know is that I can no longer set my promotion level when I list something. That option is gone. They want me to participate in something called "Promoted Listing Advanced BETA"

my-cottage-books-and-antiques · ‎03-10-2023

@movieman630 There are three types of PL:

Promoted Listing Standard (the one most of us have been using, if we've been using one at all)

Promoted Listings Advanced (which is maybe still called beta, though its been around for a while). This is much more complicated....I doubt you have been using it.

Promoted Listings Express (which only applies to auctions)

ebay has been pushing PLA on some sellers for a while. I sell vintage, single quantity items, and will probably never use it, because it is really designed more for sellers of new, multi quantity items.

So, I am guessing what you are talking about is PLStandard.

ebay trying to get you to use PLA has nothing to do with your use of PLS.

So, just to be clear, when you talk about your promotion "level", that's a number (a percentage, like an FVF, except the number is chosen by you, and must be 2% at a minimum) that ebay applies to your sale if your sale is through Promoted Listings? Is that what you are talking about?

And exactly how have you been setting this that you can't do it now? I usually create a PLS campaign though Seller Hub, but there are a number of ways to do it. Examples: Currently, for any existing, promoted listing, I can go to the listing, edit, and change it within the listing form. Or I can go to Seller Hub, Active Listings, and pick and choose which ones to change by scrolling down my actives (or searching) and clicking "Promote" in the Actions column (the far left column).

greatstuff80 · ‎03-10-2023

I talked to my postmaster the other day. She said the amount of ebay packages are literally half of what they were 2 years ago. She said every single ebay seller who comes in complains of the increased fees, constant glitches, scams and lack of true seller protections and many have quit using ebay as a result.