Promoted Listings Standard - Ad Rate Minimum Increasing (1% to 2%)

[wastingtime101]

Got this e-mail from eBay:

We're continuously evaluating the performance and impact quality of Promoted Listings Standard as a tool to drive seller success. As part of this work, effective July 11, we’ll be changing the minimum ad rate for Promoted Listings Standard from 1% to 2%. While we recognize this impacts your business, this change will ensure your campaigns remain competitive in reaching buyers in our growing marketplace, and also allow us to deliver products and services that drive best-in-class returns for eBay sellers.

Just in the past year, we’ve added new Promoted Listings Standard features like an all-in-one campaign dashboard and downloadable reports that provide sellers with a convenient way to review important campaign data. On July 11, we’ll be rolling out a new feature that’ll allow sellers to edit multiple listings at once for both Bulk and Simple campaigns. This’ll make it quicker to adjust ad rates versus having to make manual changes for each campaign.

And there’s more to come.

Next steps

We’d encourage you to adjust your ad rates that are below 2% on or before July 11 to 2% or higher so that your promoted listings can continue to appear in advertising placements across the eBay network. If you decide not to make any changes, those listings will still be active but won’t be promoted.

[my-cottage-books-and-antiques]

@mari.mazzi  You don't provide a timeline here, but it sounds like this might explain what happened. Your item sold after the 11th, but the buyer FIRST viewed it when it was a PL (at 1%). The rule is, and has been since PL began, if a buyer clicks on a PL and then buys within 30 days of that click, the PL fee is charged.

I'd guess that is what happened here.

[mari.mazzi]

Makes sense. I called ebay to complain and they reimbursed the 1% I lost.  Now I made sure they are all on stop promotion. 

[my-cottage-books-and-antiques]

@mari.mazzi  Yep. Sounds like a "courtesy" refund...ebay sometimes sees it as easier and cheaper to refund than to go through the explanation.  Keep in mind, you could still end up with some sales tied to your old campaign, because of the 30 day rule. But if you aren't running any other PLs, there's no risk of seeing more PL fees after that 30 days has run....

[1-awm]

Fees are already high enough.  So they want you to raise your prices or make less money.  Thanks, but I’ll be promoting less. 

[ghost-star]

Yep. Insane that they charge a percentage of the TAX as well. Absolutely despicable move. 

I also noticed recently that when you lower your ad rate on individiual items, about half the time the percentage doesn't change but makes you believe it did by completing the loading. So, for instance, if I'm revising a batch of items, and all of them are currently at 3% and I want to lower them all to 2%, I have to do that for each one. But somehow, the system only makes the change for about 50% to 60% of the listings, and the rest of the changes aren't made. So it's really easy to miss this error. This "glitch" is difficult to explain, but next time you do an ad rate revision for a batch of listings (of a dozen or more), make sure to go back and check the ad rate for each of them and you'll see what I mean. In order to correct this glitch, you have to keep refreshing the page each time the error occurs. 

[kh-gary]

Hi everyone,

Due to the age of this thread, it has been closed to further replies. Please feel free to start a new thread HERE if you wish to continue to discuss this topic.

Thank you for understanding.