is ebay forcing promoted listings

[craigstevensstudio]

ok, what is your opinion sellers.    is ebay  blocking sales till sellers opt in to promoted listings?   i myself say they are.

[craigstevensstudio]

blocking sellers items from bing seen in searches.

[heckofagame]

It's doubtful that you are being blocked, but if your competition is promoting at all, you will be pushed down below the promoted listings. If there are a lot of similar items being promoted, yours may not be seen.

Promotion = advertising. If you want to be seen, advertise.

[kensgiftshop]

Listings still show up in searches and I don't use promoted listings.

[donsdetour]

You need to log out and see what a search for your item shows. Should be done shortly after you list;

Not showing: end item relist using sell similar.

Sorry can do anything about the stuff that shows up unrelated to the search...

[my-cottage-books-and-antiques]

@craigstevensstudio 

Blocking sellers? No.

But...

If you don't promote, your items will show up on the search results page and that's about it. Promoted Listings (PLS) show up on far more pages, such as listing pages. So, right there, you are at a disadvantage. 

If your competitors do use PLS effectively, they gain the advantage of better placement on the search results page AND all the additional placements on other pages.

So, it may seem like ebay is blocking your sales, but what is really happening is, your competition is blocking your sales by advertising.

Of course, depending on what you sell, what sort of sales velocity you want, etc, you can do without PLS. But it's like any business where advertising matters: if the other guy is advertising effectively and you aren't, you are probably going to find yourself struggling.

I no longer think of my ebay store /listings as an "ad". 

I think of it as a store. It is there, in this huge business district, and I hopefully get some traffic. But if everyone else in the business district is advertising, and I'm not, I might have a problem. So, having an ebay store is just a business. A business I need to advertise and promote. And so I do.

[chapeau-noir]

I promote and my sales go up and down, sometimes in big waves.

[slippinjimmy]

---

@craigstevensstudio wrote:

ok, what is your opinion sellers.    is ebay  blocking sales till sellers opt in to promoted listings?   i myself say they are.

---

If they are they are doing a REALLY bad job of it.

On one selling id I DO NOT use PL, sales are good,  on another id I do use PL and sales are miserable.

This confirms what I have always thought, PL can bring you lots of impressions but won't help much to move merchandise nobody wants and/or not competitively priced and/or poorly presented.

No surprise, this is the same experience I had spending money on advertising in the days before ecommerce existed.

[lamber9347]

---

@craigstevensstudio wrote:

ok, what is your opinion sellers.    is ebay  blocking sales till sellers opt in to promoted listings?   i myself say they are.

---

No, they are not. Why do I say that, because I have never used promoted listings (and never will) and if eBay were blocking my sales, then I literally would never sell anything, but my financials show otherwise.... 

[babclassics]

What I have found is that the RATE you promote at has to be analyzed carefully to not waist money. Ran several tests over 1 week periods at different rates.  What was evident is there is a threshold for good R-O-I. 

If you compare your "impressions" with your "views", high rates tend to create a whole lot more impressions but not many more views.  I think eBay has so many promotions to fill that they put an item so far into the giant scrolling lists of promoted items on other sellers pages that nobody ever sees them.  They still count as impressions though (so you get to pay the fee if it sells).

So if you increase your rate from zero to 2, or from 2 to 4, etc. and the stats for several days show good increase in views AND impressions then good.  But then you want more, so you increase your rate to 10%.  Now if you see that your views hardly went up, but your impressions went way up then that extra 8% is not buying you much benefit.

At higher rates (except in extremely saturated areas) eBay just has no place to put your Ad that anybody will ever find.  Once you get the main search placement you want any more spending to get placement on other sellers pages is too far buried on their listing pages. At least my tests have shown that.

Not saying 2% is the best rate, it varies.  But if you don't compare views to impressions ratio at different rates you will be wasting Ad money.  Would be interested to hear what others have found in this area?

[coolections]

NO, they are not blocking anyone. They do not block people for not having promotions. The very first thing you need to understand is what promotions are all about. Oversaturated categories with tons of competition need promotions. Reason is when there are 30 pages for a buyer to go through your item may be on page 30. No buyer in their right mind searches 30 pages. The good news is if there are less than 3 pages you will most likely never need promotions as many buyers will search that far. Summary, lots of competition use promotions. Very little competition don't need promotions.

[rugerskick]

They definitely recommend it.  Quite hard.

I think in certain competitive categories most sellers feel its 100% needed.

It will lower your position on searches, but you doing certain things can also raise your position on searches.

The real problem affecting everyone are the sitewide problems like server crashes that your listings are on, your items will not sell and sales will all of a sudden drop off a cliff for no earthly reason.  Also learning that ebay is using active user accounts and redirecting them to be used for beta testing periodically, which means during these times you will not get any sales on the live ebay site, is not great to hear either.  But this is being done to your account and mine by ebay without warning, until you see your sales all of a sudden vanish for days or weeks.

I am in this stage right now.  My sales have vanished the last few days.  My habits are habits, normal everyday routines that are stable.  

[laststopgeneralstore]

No, they aren't. You don't need to promote your listings to get sales. Does it help with traffic? Yes, but more traffic doesn't always equal more sales. If you have a bad listing that's priced to high then most likely no amount of traffic will get a buyer to buy it. If you cannot get sales without using promoted listings then that means your listing and/or item your selling is bad. If you don't have an optimized listing then of course it's going to get pushed down in search.

Also, why would eBay block sales(eBay's revenue via final value fee's) from sellers? That has to be one of the most asinine claims that I've heard on these boards and believe me, there are A LOT of really far our stupid claims that people make about sales but have horrible listings and items for sale. Good luck.

[earthdreamer]

Funnily enough, the only items that are selling for me are the ones that are not promoted.

This could be because they are in higher demand than my promoted listings, but all the same, I would have to disagree with your premise. 

[north-by-northeast-finds]

This is why I made the comment "everything you say can and will be used against you".

If you  happen to use a keyword that is  well known or even semi well known whether its Batman, New York Yankees or Andy Warhol you are going to be in a major traffic jam.