here is how you might be able to make it actually work with promoted listings;
You take an item you bought for 5 dollars and would have sold for twenty. Since you know you have to pay a 20% bid rate on promotional listings (and additional four dollar hit), plus you FVF etc, you list the item for 30 dollars. You get the top spot, item sells because - as PT Barnum said "There's a sucker born every minute" somebody didn't look deeper into the results so you made an extra four bucks to not only pay for the PL costs, but the FVF & PP fees padding your profit margins. Since we're all good ebayers, we naturally have free shipping and free return shipping along with a nice 30 day return policy with our guaranteed delivery, not that GD matters with free shipping, which should help us meet all but the low price. Some good copy spin in our content and a catchy title should do the trick to catch PT's favorite customer.
Now the great part - everybody gets paid. Ebay makes 20 percent more on a transaction than otherwise - padding their P&L. You made more on your item, padding your P&L. Customer gets what they paid for giving you a nice overall transaction.
The risky part is; the buyer gets the item and some wisdom realizing that they could have bought the same item for 20 bucks from another seller. The ol' buyers remorse on your otherwise nice transaction kicks in. So, since we're good eBayers we have to take the item back for free. Now we're out the shipping to and return shipping - but at least we get our FVF & PM Fee back! Woot! Trust me when I say, there are seller running the above deal in certain categories where it is easy to do with relatively unique items.
To offset my cynicism on the issue, I suppose, if you sell enough stuff at way over price to make up the difference in the returns (and they don't ding your seller rating enough that you lose the ability to sell), no big deal, but I don't know a lot of small business owners that can not afford the bid prices and to eat all of that on returns much less the slim margins if you try to compete at a reasonable retail rate for merchandise. For big box sellers, it can be treated like a loss leader type of deal, though eBay is definitely not the most ideal platform for in store cross selling.
But in the end, not knowing a thing about PL, if I were to use the system, my prices are going to go way up to cover whatever added percentage I am going to have to bid on eBay to get that top spot. I just can't see how that is good for buyers.
Cheers
