Regards,
@wilsonharborsales wrote:I am doing my best to stay hopeful that the issue is resolved. I am on hold with customer service again today. I have been transferred many times, one of the customer service agents was clearly on a farm somewhere (roosters crowing in the background), another agent told me to speak to his brother for a little bit (there were kids screaming in the background). I don't know where to turn at this point. It is downright scary. I have had one sale in the past 18 hours. I generally sell between 25-30 items per day. Only the past 12 days have been this way.
@wilsonharborsales eBay launched two new Promoted Listing feature recently PLA BETA and the way PLS standard items are charged AD rates via how Buyer purchase them from a Seller ... if memory serves on that latter statement, if a Buyer finds one item through a Promoted listing then sees what else the Seller has and Buys from them all the items get charged the AD rate on Promoted Listing campaign.
It is a new twist to Pay to Play and as such eBay has to adjust algorithms to give the PLA BETA listings their place in returned search as well as LINK sold items via PLS purchases as described above ...
So what all the mumbo jumbo means is that its advantageous for eBay to process transactions that have an additional AD rate on them compared to items that do not.
You can certainly "test drive" a Promoted Listing Campaign by putting half of your items on it with either one fixed AD rate or go with eBay's trending rates ... which to me are suspect considering that previously when I picked one fixed AD rate between 5% - 10% I was typically always ABOVE eBay's trending rates ... now they have raised those "trending" rates. Its just kind of hard for me to believe that Trending rates have over tripled in the Collectible categories I sell in ...
@wilsonharborsales wrote:I had a promotional listings advisor from eBay reach out to me a few months ago. I am currently promoting my items up to 25% based on their recommendation. She also spoke to me about using the pay-per-click method of promotion. We tested the new pay-per-click variation using a $2 bid at her recommendation. For my items whcih are generally vintage and unique or rare, the new promoted listings didn't work well. On many sold items, fees were as high as 70%. We determined that this was because uninterested buyers were being shown items that they weren't looking for.
Either way, using standard promoted listings I was still generating very strong sales until April 1st or so, which is the drop off date for me. In the past 24 hours I have sold $24 worth of items, with 13,200 items listed and approximately $750,000 worth of inventory.
@wilsonharborsales 70% fees on sold item? Even 25% is too high to be honest ... something is definitely wrong and I sincerely hope you and they can get it figured out. I run fixed duration PLS campaigns ... one 30 day PLS per quarter ... I do not use the "Continuous" setting in the PLS flow. Historically prior to 2022 sales would tank for one week to 10 days once a PLS ended then they would go back to normal levels. PLS was a nice quarterly boost in sales. in 2022 that changed until my 1st Quarter 2023 PLS ... it did great, like it used too. The one I currently have running is about as bad as what I saw through last year. When Sellers are simply doing business as normal and things change drastically it is the venue and not the Seller ...
If the PL scam is the reason I have sold almost nothing over the past 3 weeks, eBay will just have get used to not making anything on what I have to sell. I'm perfectly satisfied selling it elsewhere, which I already do. I charge about 20% less locally than here because I don't need to make up for all of eBay's nonsense and fees. The buyers win and so do I. I may be a small seller, but multiply me be a large enough number and it makes a difference.
At the current rate, the photo below will soon have a single digit "sold" number and a 3-digit "90-day total". If eBay isn't happy with the 15% that they have been taking, they'll just have to be satisfied with 15% of nothing.
