eBay

allthingsa2z · ‎05-03-2017

Hi All! I'm wondering if anyone has experienced this before:

Back in Oct of last year I put 20 - 30 items in my store on a promotion so they'd appear as an ad.. I'd check back after a day or so any there were no impressions, no clicks and nothing sold. I changed the ad rate up to 20% and waited another couple of days. Still nothing. I left the promotions up for over a month, still nothing. I tried to talk to CS about it but that was no help at all so I cancelled the promotions and moved on.

I've now decided to reapproach this topic. I've only added one item to this promotion and am hoping to see something over the next few days.

But what I'm wondering: Has anyone else had trouble with promoted listings? Does it have to do with the category/section that our products are listed in? Any insight or advice would be greatly appreciated!

slati_2013 · ‎12-12-2018

My problem with promoted listings is they seem to appear right on top of the normal listing. I no longer click on promoted or sponsored listings because chances are good I will click on the regular listing. It is very annoying while searching to click on both listings and realizing they are the same thing.

coolections · ‎12-12-2018

@allthingsa2z wrote:
We actually have figured out the issue: Sex toys cannot be promoted (Womp womp)

Sounds like Ebay did the right thing and there was no issue. I for one am very happy as I do not want to see your sex toys when searching something irrelevant. It has me wondering why I saw your nasty items without Ebay warning me. THAT is what Ebay needs to fix.

allthingsa2z · ‎12-12-2018

I'm not sure why you think you would see sex toys when searching for something "irrelevant". You would only see one of our listings or even a promoted listing if you are searching for one of the key words in our listing title.

You also wouldn't see any sort of sex toy unless you've specifically searched for an item of that nature eBay's search is pretty on top of it when it comes to that sort of thing.

Also, just because you consider something "nasty" doesn't mean it is and again you won't see them unless you are searching for them

foxyloxyvintageandcollectibles · ‎01-27-2019

ebay is quite cagey about promoted listings. It's impossible to find out which of your listings are promoted and which are not (the Excel spreadsheet doesn't download); it suggests you choose 1% over the norm for listings of your type. HA! If you are on the app, it suggests you just hit the button and it's an instant 7%; so you paying ebay about 16% of your gross (not net, they count postage into your total) for doing pretty much nothing. I have had slightly better results on promoted listings, which they note as promoted on your own listing, and hopefully put on the listings other people have for the same or similar items.

I think ebay is all about maximizing the nickels and dimes from millions of sellers. They don't care if your listing sells for a profit, they are all about making a sale at all. that's when they make their money.

Hedging my bets, I put just about everything on a 3-4% promotion; in the categories in which most people don't promote, I'll still come out tops, while seeing some of my promotions with other categories. Not sure if it helps or not, but I certainly don't want to spend the high rate they propose.

Here's the basic response you should know: if ebay says it's to benefit the seller, look again. It's always always always to benefit ebay, not you.

BTW DON"T change your payment method to the managed payment options, you still have to pay ebay at the end of the month, they float your money for a day or two before making it "available for payout", for some reason it takes several days longer to post to your bank account and you have no choice in the matter whatsoever. With paypal, my funds were immediately available, I could choose when they would send it (no dribble drabbling of $10 deposits into my account,) the postage effectively netted against the payment that was already in my Paypal account. I hate to be a curmudgeon about this, but I've been selling on ebay for 10 years now and, this is my experience. Pssst ... pass it on.

guidonin · ‎02-19-2019

Hello guys,

I have been experiencing the same issues. I started seeing on ebay last year and started using promoted listing "sponsored" to create some traffic to my account as I am a new seller. Every time I promoted something it was working like a champ. One day after I set my listing to have the marketing my listing used to appear twice as it should be. One from organic search and one from sponsored which usually gets you a better ranking for new sellers. For old sellers not that much, as they have better SEO with Cassini due to prior sales.

My problem started on January 25th when all my promoted listing randomly stopped working. I used to have an average of 2,500-12,000 impression with my listings and I had 100 items. Then a few days later I added a lot more witch made me get to 300 items. I started to notice that my impressions went from 12,000 per day with 100 items to 500 per day with 300 items. Clearly something happened there. I call ebay every day and they can never fix the issue.

I created a secondary account to try the promoted listing and guess what? It worked. At this point, I don't really see this as a glitch anymore. It must have something with all that they don't want to explain to us. I this point I feel discourage of using ebay to sell my items.

If anyone has any answers to this issue please let me know as I need to get my sales back on track.

sscot6 · ‎11-08-2019

Be aware that for people who are using the Firefox browser with an adblocker extension (and this is a lot of people), “sponsored” listings do not show up in the search results for an item. This is because the adblocker sees the item in the search results, treats it as an ad (which it is) and blocks it from appearing. Listings which are not “sponsored” show up in the search results normally. At least this was happening the last time I checked recently.

I discovered this by accident when I was using the “Edge” browser to peruse some Ebay listings as a buyer instead of using Firefox with an adblocker (there are a number of them) as I normally do. I found a number of listings showing in the “Edge” results that I hadn’t seen in the same results done at the same time on my Firefox browser.

I then went back to my Firefox browser, turned off the adblocker extension and sure enough, the “sponsored” listing results started showing up in my search for that item. I now turn off my adblocker when I am searching Ebay as a buyer. I really don’t know what advice to give sellers in this regard other than to make people aware that this can and does happen.