eBay

my-cottage-books-and-antiques · ‎07-05-2022

There was a question today on the ebay for business podcast about using "subtitle" in an ebay listing. I'll skip the details, but thought this quote was worth repeating, from long time ebay exec Brian Burke brian_burke@ebay

"Don't give money to eBay that you don't have to give to us. ... if you can successfully sell your item without doing it. And that's why we encourage folks to test, because that will allow you to optimize the dollars you spend on eBay, which means you're gonna keep selling on eBay, which is good for eBay and good for you. And for some things like you sell , really unique items, rarely do you need something like some of the features that we offer."

I agree with this. There is a big difference between something ebay requires (for example, the required item specifics for a certain category) and the many optional features and tools ebay provides, which might or might not be useful for a particular seller. My own take on this:

For any optional feature/tool:

1. If you are convinced it won't help your business, ignore it.

2. If you think it MIGHT help your business, experiment with it.

3. If the experiment shows it doesn't help you, don't use it.

4. If the experiment shows it does help you, go ahead and use it.

Examples from my own business:

1. Promoted Listing Advanced: Ignore.

2. Coded Coupons: Experiment.

ebay is huge, and there are a lot of different business models here, and ebay provides a lot of optional features and tools. The Vault? I doubt I will ever use it. But , obviously, some sellers will benefit from it. Promoted Listings? Useful for some sellers, not a good fit for others. Much of the data provided by Seller Hub is much more useful for sellers of multi-quantity listings, but some is useful for sellers like me, with long tail one offs....

Use whatever you find works for you.

my-cottage-books-and-antiques · ‎07-07-2022

@vintagecraze50 "Well I would have to agree especially with all this inflation and lower sales that upping your price to promote it is not a very good idea AT ALL."

A recent post on a Facebook Group said the exact opposite: The seller said he had increased all his prices by, I think it was 20%, and increased his PL rate, and his sales increased dramatically.

Unfortunately, I didn't make a note of where I saw this, and didn't get to ask him any questions. But, at least for some items, I can see this working. A lot of long tail items, for example, don't really have a clear price point (unlike certain collectibles and many new popular items).

As a seller, I'd probably want to be careful with this. Now that ebay has changed the way the PL fee is calculated, it would be especially easy to increase the PL rate so much that it actually reduces the seller's net, even with an item price increase.

I might play around with this strategy at some point. While we know the PL rate is not the ONLY factor ebay looks at when deciding when and where to promote an item, we also know it IS a factor. I don't think this would work well for all business models, but it might not be a bad idea for me to try it, since I sell long tail single quantity listings.

I believe most of my PL sales do not come from the search page, I suspect they come from the other pages reserved for PLs, and the purchase is often more of an impulse purchase, so item price is not necessarily as big a factor as when someone is actually scrolling through the search results page.

Just thought I'd point out another way of looking at his.

zamo-zuan · ‎07-07-2022

@my-cottage-books-and-antiques wrote:

A recent post on a Facebook Group said the exact opposite: The seller said he had increased all his prices by, I think it was 20%, and increased his PL rate, and his sales increased dramatically.

Yep, that's exactly what I meant in my post.

You can't just naturally get sales anymore, and if you test things out on your store, giving customers good prices will only hurt you. You'll get less profit, less impressions, less traffic.

Often times profit margins are already tight, if you can do as much as you could reasonably afford, it's not enough to bring in a decent amount of traffic.

But if you increase your price to invest even more? That gives such a substantial increase in traffic that even if you get a lower conversion rate, mathematically having so much more impressions/views will bring in more total sales.

To have a marketplace with a design such as this is insanity, though. It *shouldn't* be the only way sellers could make more money, because raising the prices so much is extremely damaging to the marketplace and the customers!

Why on earth the algorithms are designed in a way where this is optimal for sellers is beyond me...

partfinds · ‎07-07-2022

@zamo-zuan

”we go through our ads that appear on Google, and often times one of the listings that claims to be for one of our items will take us to a COMPETITORS item. Meaning whatever item is linked on Google is just kind of a "reference" and not a link to the actual listing, and can sometimes be a "similar" item.”

I posted about this about 2 weeks ago. They have done that to my radio. The linked different seller to my sold radio picture in web search. The only option you have is putting some sort of business card or some identification of your store to let buyer know that they are not in your store when they clicked web search image.

partfinds · ‎07-07-2022

@zamo-zuan

“It's funny you mention the views on an item. There's ways you could play with that and that I've tested. If you're in any off-eBay groups and find an item that hasn't been getting any traffic, try sending it to the group and having a bunch of friends check it out. That sudden burst in traffic will encourage eBay to send even more traffic to it. It seems the algorithm thinks there's sudden interest in the item and sends more people. Doing this has "woken up" some listings that have fell off for months/years and restored them to getting traffic.”

My observation is (after studying day by day my past views) that ebay caps the amount of views one can get daily.

zamo-zuan · ‎07-07-2022

@partfinds wrote:

My observation is (after studying day by day my past views) that ebay caps the amount of views one can get daily.

Do you mean total amount of views daily? Or per listing?

Listings seem to be driven by interest, as I'd mentioned. I don't know of any specific cap per listing, but it does seem "momentum" is built by more views.

Regarding daily views, I typically watch impressions more than views, as that's you actually appearing in search. To get a view, you need to first get that impression. And impressions certainly do slow down once you get to a certain point (related to what I'd mentioned earlier about limits as well as with the promotions giving organic impressions).

In response to views potentially being capped, it could very well be that a certain amount of views reduces/prevents the chance of getting further impressions (which in turn leads to less views). At that point you'd need off-eBay hits in order to get views. Which may actually bring some more traffic if you're lucky to get some, but in most cases eBay doesn't get the most off-eBay traffic.

I know limiting visibility isn't something some people want to believe (I've encountered many people over the years who say eBay would have no reason to do that). But let's face it. It would be impossible for promoted impressions to give less organic impressions unless their organic search is limiting how much you show up.

partfinds · ‎07-07-2022

@zamo-zuan

no matter how many impressions I got (more or less) I am in the same daily views number. I can’t go over 150/a day for all my items. I have not had fluctuations in daily views (for all my items) i.e. one day 600 next 400 another 1000. It is all the time now for couple past months about 100 (pretty low for that many claimed active buyers ). I have noticed promoted listings impressions declining without any changes to campaigns or with daily listings and adding items to those campaigns.

i don’t trust the impressions numbers.

there must be some relation impressions to views.

zamo-zuan · ‎07-07-2022

@partfinds wrote:
@zamo-zuan

no matter how many impressions I got (more or less) I am in the same daily views number. I can’t go over 150/a day for all my items. I have not had fluctuations in daily views (for all my items) i.e. one day 600 next 400 another 1000. It is all the time now for couple past months about 100 (pretty low for that many claimed active buyers ). I have noticed promoted listings impressions declining without any changes to campaigns or with daily listings and adding items to those campaigns.
i don’t trust the impressions numbers.

there must be some relation impressions to views.

What do the changes is click through rate claim? As that should be the relation between impressions/views.

I do find it interesting that you've had stable views, though.

Regarding the promoted listings changes, that could be why. The rates in your category may have changed and you might not be allowed to move any higher without further investment. For ~2+ years now this has basically become the norm (as discussed in this thread - https://community.ebay.com/t5/Selling/Potential-problem-with-Promoted-Listings-impressions/td-p/3121... ).

That situation hasn't changed. If anything it's only worse, considering the organic drops with promotions now too.

Although I must say, there's something majorly strange with placement on the search pages this week in our category. After the 4th it seems more volatile than I've seen it in years... I wouldn't be surprised if eBay is either trying some experimental algorithm or is facing some major issues right now.