Prior to the change, I promoted everything at a low rate for almost two years. I ended all promotions the day before the change took effect.
I have implemented a two-fold strategy.
First, I am not promoting anything that is newly listed. There is really no need to do this. Before, it was simply a time saver to promote everything since I was doing it at a very low percent. Now that eBay's approach is different, the money I could be charged otherwise outweighs the time savings.
The first thing is that I am using a program to automatically promote items after 30-days. This gives items a month to sale without any promotions. I reset (end/sell similar) all of my listings on January 12th, so it will be a couple more weeks before this kicks in.
In the meantime, I have run two weekends of promotions, starting on Friday and ending on Monday. I have been more aggressive with my ad rate, though not "out of this world" - still using a single number. I've been pleased with this so far. My plan is to continue with testing this strategy for another two weekends. After that, the 30-day delay auto promote strategy will kick in and I'll run that about 4 weeks.
As I have thought about things lately, I'd rather pay an ad rate than run a sale or even send out offers. I can run a 5% ad rate and claim $5 out of every $100 of sales on my taxes. If I offer that same 5% or 10% to a buyer, I can't claim that discount. So one of my goals, at least for Q1 this year, is to run less sales and be more strategic when sending out offers. I tend to price above the market, because I do run sales. However, I have been impressed at the number of people who are buying things at full price. Those are the buyers I want. 😁
