Sellers - Promoting Listings

[jodieblue57]

For those of you that have promoted listings, do you find that it really helps with your sales?

[violetsource]

I think it does. I had some slow selling varieties of plants that were about ready to top out in easy shipping size. They were pretty varieties and I had great photos. I dropped the price a tiny bit and promoted them at the default percentage. While I did sell a few more of the hard to sell varieties, my sales on other varieties went way up. The promoted listings brought more customers to me when the searched my other listings. It gave me more visibility. So now I always have a few promoted listings as "loss leaders" I consider it advertisement. 

[gwzcomps]

Anything I have promoted shows up with the wrong terms so it has been a waste of time for me personally.  I have even used higher than recommended rates as a test.

[nc-daydreamer]

No. I did it from the start. In this many months, I've sold 2 promoted items out of the 100 I selected to promote. One of those as an experiment I removed from the program and was charged fees anyway because the buyer looked at it while it was promoted and bought it within the 30 days following. I just went back to having sales instead and gave up on almost all promos.  Good luck if you try that route.

[corndogcache]

We don't use them often. They might be useful under certain circumstances. I think a common sense approach to figuring out if they'd work for you is to do an ebay-wide search for any piece you're thinking of promoting. I can't tell you how often, as a seller of vintage, I do a search for something we have to list, and I get two results -- one a regular listing, and the other the promoted listing/ad for that very same listing! Not exactly a good use of your time and money, right? Even when there are a dozen results on a search, sometimes half or more of them are promoted listings for the very same listings, so there's really only six listings. Price and condition are going to determine which of those six listings sell, not which ones are promoted. Very few buyers on ebay just browse categories anymore. There's too much stuff to go through. Search is the number one way people find what they're interested in. If there's a ton of results, they're almost always going to sort by price, low to high. I just don't see how promoted listings make your item stand out unless the price and condition are also there, and if they're there, then why pay to promote them? There may be circumstances under which promoted listings make sense, but I'm not sure what they are. Good luck!

[mam98031]

I think it depends on the category you are selling in.  For some I see that they might work great and others not near as important.  In the categories I sell in I do not use them and my sales are fine.  2020 being my best year in a long time.  But I know other categories are having more issues.  So my suggestion to you is more research.

This thread is a great start.  Getting the insight from fellow sellers can be extremely helpful.  But do you own research and do some test listings.  To get any kind of accurate return on your testing, you need to do it for a few months.  Summertime is typically a slower selling time normally for many sellers.  But come mid September we all should be firing up for the Holiday Season.