Promoted Listings < recommended %

[leverage5inc]

Any info regarding using a % Below Recommended percentage.

Is the item in Limbo, Promoted, under-promoted, equal to Not promoting?

If I insert 4% on an item recommended at 13.5% (Yes), what is officially supposed to occur? I haven't seen anything addressing this.

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[gamersbaystore]

Exactly. Promoted listings are a joke. The hundreds of listings I put up over the summer of 2022 were all promoted, and virtually all had zero views coming the end of the year.

I shut my store down last Dec and moved all that inventory over to Mercari, a platform that unlike ebay still has shoppers and doesn't treat their sellers like total garbage. I dump off the sloppy seconds on ebay now.

Go read the media and financial reports for ebay, this platform lost millions of buyers and sellers over the last 2 years alone.

The traffic ebay still does have is given to their executives wealthy corporate friends. Search for any movie imaginable, the same 5 sellers take up 99% of search results.

ebay wants us to give everything away for free, and those who refuse have all their items hidden from buyers. They turned this platform into a dollar store where everything is $3.99 with free shipping and the only one making money is feebay.

[luckythewinner]

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@leverage5inc wrote:

If I insert 4% on an item recommended at 13.5% (Yes), what is officially supposed to occur?

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The higher your promotion rate, the higher the CHANCE that it will be placed into one of the limited number of promoted listings spots in any search for which it qualifies. 

eBay cannot possibly tell you what those chances are because it depends upon (a) what the user's search criteria are, (b) how many promoted listings match that search, (c) what rate they are all promoted at, and (d) random chance.

Think of it like a drawing for a raffle. The higher your promotion rate, the more raffle tickets you have in the hopper when the winners are drawn. 

[ajs_coins_and_alchemy]

Your mileage may vary... this is merely my own experience.

I started selling 18 months ago and started promoting 15 months ago. I only use PLS (Standard) which is what you're asking about. Initially recommendations were 2.6% on the low end for my bullion and 5-7% on the high end for my modern coins. One year later, my recommendations are consistently 9-13.5% that's MORE than my FVF, my store discounted FVF is 7.35% on bullion and 9% on Coins. So paying that much or more in ads is a joke.

I always have and continue to promote across the board at 3%. It's nice because it's a fraction of my FVF discount, so I can pay FVF & promotions and pay less in fees than others who don't promote.

I did a test, purely anectdotal and no empirical data as there could be some additional unknown factors, but I cut all promotions cold turkey for 3 weeks in June, my sales during that time were 20% of what they were immediately prior, and then immediately jumped increased by 5x after re-promoting. So i have strong indications that a small promotion fee pays off extremely well for me by allowing me to do a lot more volume for a minimal cost.

My promoted impressions are like 10x my organic. My promoted page views are 1-2x my organic views.

Most importantly:

Prior to the HALO program my portion of sales attributed to promotions, as measured by $$, was  consistently 66.6% +/- 2%. After the HALO program, my portion of sales attributed to promotions is about 70%. HALO has NOT significantly increased my costs.

Although I promote 100% of my listings, I pay ad fees on 70% of the revenue as 30% comes from organic sales.