eBay

gurlcat · ‎03-07-2024

I thought I had this promoted at 9.1% .....well, no. I will actually have to pay a bit out of pocket just to ship this thing. Oy.

isaiah53-57 · ‎03-08-2024

@inhawaii wrote:
@isaiah53-57 wrote:
@inhawaii wrote:
@gurlcat
Nice to see you taking responsibility.
Glad to see you're human and are capable of making mistakes (like me).
I've seen so many other sellers come here blaming ebay for such errors.
Your right ...how could ebay possibly have any fault in this... Surely they thought she "responsibly " wanted to promote her listing at 91% - I mean who wouldn't want to right?? And they were more than happy to do so for her.

Maybe its time the site started acting "responsibly" for a change...
gurlcat
You're off the hook.
It was all ebay's fault.
They should have know nobody would possibly promote their item that high.

That's the MOST intelligent and reasonable thing I have ever seen you post -

gurlcat · ‎03-09-2024

@luckythewinner wrote:
YIKES, mind that decimal point if you do promotions

You also need to mind the decimal point when setting prices, entering shipping amounts, making offers, and issuing refunds. And anywhere else you enter a number.

Absolutely. -If I've any excuse at all, it's that I only ever make a mistake like this when I'm doing a "batch" task, as opposed to a single isolated one. -I'm certain I entered the promotion rate correctly when I first created the listing for this Disney pin, but it sold in its' 2nd or 3rd existence of being ended/sell similar'ed. I do this for most listings approaching their 30th day of age, and when I do it I turn the promotion OFF before hitting 'List It', continue on with the other listings in the batch, then close the browser, reopen and go back to eBay, and reapply the promotions to all those "new," now-live listings.* I also send out offers in batches. These are the kinds of tasks I enjoy least, so sometimes I get in a rush to get it over with, and that's where trouble lurks. I have even done something similar doing batches of feedbacks a couple of times, switching from sales to purchases and saying (copy/pasting) to sellers I bought from, "Thanks for your purchase from Gurlcat's Wurld!" 🤣

But that's nothing; you should see me around the house. I'll pour milk into the coffee machine's water reservoir, throw food in the trash while holding the wrapper, etc. One time my husband and I both watched as my hands picked up the big pot of crab leg shells which had been simmering in water for hours to extract the flavor for an exquisite chowder .... and dumped it into the strainer in the sink .... with no pot under it to catch the broth, so it all went right down the drain. I'm probably brain damaged from the time when I was 14 and sprayed Raid all over my hair, thinking it was Aqua Net hairspray.

Blonde hair. -Shocking, huh?

*If anyone is still reading and wants to know why/when I do end/sell similars, or why I stop and restart promoting them, ask and I'll explain. It's totally off-topic to this thread and I've talked about it in others, so for now I'll leave it out of this one.

zamo-zuan · ‎03-11-2024

@gurlcat wrote:
@vitameatavegamom wrote:
Can you tell if the sky high promo rate sold it faster than you've sold similar items without the promo?
I've experimented with higher and lower promo rates and don't really feel like the higher rates are worth it.
Well assuming it works the way it purports to, as a "competitive" agent, then theoretically you can't promote any better than ... better than everyone else. So if the highest anyone else was promoting Disney pins was, say, 25%, then no, 91% would not make any noticeable difference. However (again theoretically) someone promoting at 25% should get about "twice" as much promotion as someone using the current suggested rate of 11.9% (last I checked).

But what exactly does "how much" promotion quantify, exactly? How often the item shows up in this or that location, purportedly. But obviously that makes it so hard to check up on. -Just because I do use promotion doesn't mean I'm a cheerleader for it. I find it EXTREMELY suspicious that we have to rely on eBay's word that an item either 'did' or 'didn't' sell via promotion. -eBAy, as in, the same one who CHARGES when the item "did" sell that way. That would be like NBC charging Tide for commercials according to whether people purchased their detergent because they saw the commercials ... and only NBC is privy to that information.

The closest I have seen to hard data on what happens with various promotion rates were experiments done by @zamo-zuan . And he keeps his links, so if he sees this and has time (very busy auto parts seller, mind you) maybe he'll chime in.

It has changed a bit over the years, but as far as our testing goes, it has always been like an "on/off switch". Each category seems to have a certain amount of investment to "turn the switch on". For us, if we invest more than that, it has NOT made traffic or sales increase.

Problem has been that they have consistently upped the number you must invest in order to "keep the switch turned on". What used to be 1%, then 2%, now has us with the majority of our listings at 6% just to stay turned on. And we've tried rates higher than that, it doesn't do anything.

I don't believe what they say really either. Their traffic numbers don't add up in a way that makes sense. There's far too much "consistency" and anyone who has done SEO or eCommerce for a long time knows that there's a level of "randomness" to be expected in traffic.

And well, just a little common sense dictates something is up. With typically > 2/3 of the listing views being Organic and not Promoted, how could it possibly be that not a single day in the last month has had more Organic sales than Promoted sales? Minimum daily promo sales in the last month was 56%. While the MAXIMUM daily promoted views was 38%. That alone doesn't really pass a sniff test.

But what people should be really trying to look in to is how they are consistently increasing their PLS ad revenue quarter by quarter. That money is coming from somewhere. Let's say for argument sake that PLS is a "competitive" system, then it wouldn't really facilitate forever increasing PLS numbers, would it? And in any case, it's a race to the bottom, because the more sellers have to invest in PLS, the more they have to put their prices up to compensate (which artificially inflates eBays GMV numbers) which then make eBay LESS COMPETITIVE than other marketplaces.

It's forming a bubble that will eventually burst, giving some short-term gains for stockholders, using GMV numbers to give the impression that the marketplace is as healthy as ever, when the marketplace health of eBay is by far the worst it's ever been since we've started selling on eBay.

isaiah53-57 · ‎03-11-2024

@robbie31415 wrote:
Lol you are so salty about promoted listings.

My last two sales sold at 16% ad rate, and I made plenty of money off it. 🙂

Made plenty huh? Lets look at a $60 item with a $12 shipping wash and 6% sales tax that you bought for $18:

(We wont take into account all other true costs such as: gas, office expense, shipping material,

asset wear and tear, returns, loss, accounting, storage, taxes, internet, phone, etc, etc, etc...

Let alone the time spent listing in: sourcing, picture taking, researching, creating a listing, storing,

retrieving, driving, packing, shipping, site problems, answering questions, log-in's, promotions,

delisting, relisting, dealing with returns, accounting, taxes, printer problems, etc, etc, etc)

If you are promoting at 16%, that would be total fees of near 30% of the entire Transaction.

$76(rounded) x 29%(rounded) = $23(rounded with the .40 cent transaction fee) in fees.

So, when you listed this item, you stood to make $38 profit after item purchase cost.

ebay took $23 of that leaving you with $15 profit after accounting for fees and item purchase cost on a $60 item. $15 to account for ALL the other TRUE costs as well as the value of your average time invested per sale.

So maybe you made $10 BEFORE TAXES on this sale? - Yup that would take quite the entrepeneur to function in that fashion..

This is not about how much you need to make, its about HIGH FEES - If it was about how much you need to make, then we could be looking at a $500 item and even if ebay fees were $470, you still made your $15 net profit after fees & item cost and everything is just fine in ebay land, right?...No... this is about high fees and getting disproportionately rich off the back of struggling customers.