eBay

hlmacdon · ‎01-03-2020

I thought I would share my results over a longer time sample. During this time I tested some products with a higher ad rate but consistently found that sales did not scale with increased ad rates in any meaningful way, the vast majority of sales were at the minimum spend. Some other observations:

Ebay's reporting doesn't fully capture the benefits of promoted listings. Specifically I've noticed two consistent trends. Most new customers I have acquired over the period are via promoted listings, and many of them convert to semi-regular buyers. More importantly a large percentage of promoted listing sales have generated multiple attach sales and have proven to be a good way of generating store browsing which leads to more sales activity. Ebay's reporting fails to capture either of these two metrics and they would be wise to incorporate them into the dashboard to give sellers a better overall picture of the ROI. I don't have an easy way to measure this given ebay's reporting, but anecdotally I'd say at least 30% if not more have multiple items purchased stemming from the initial promoted listings sale.
Conversion rates don't seem to increase with promoted listings when viewed in aggregate. It takes many, many impressions to generate a click and even then the sell through rate is fairly equivalent to normal traffic. It is really about generating enough impressions.
While many new customers are being acquired I do see a large amount of regular customers showing up as promoted listing sales. To me this indicates that while they are regular shoppers (I have a number of buyers that purchase multiple times a week) their browsing activity still remains via the search engine rather than natural browsing of favorite seller store sto see what is new. Considering that I'd say promoted listings are important to help you stay at the forefront of the buying activity of even your most regular customers.
There has been an ongoing war between ebay and some of the ad blocking programs over promoted listings. Ebay has changed the code that inserts promoted listings on several occasions to counter this. Some have worried that due to the popularity of ad blocking programs there is a danger of losing sales. I have no way to measure that to conclude one way or another but comparing the last 6 months of 2019 to the year prior I finished up YOY with about 20% less inventory. In the first 6 months of the year without any consistent promoted listing activity I had some really wild up and down swings and I would say consistent promoted listing activity has helped minimize the downward swing.

Overall I'm happy with the results I have been seeing. For a very minimal cost there have been appreciable benefits and a positive ROI. I expect results to change come next quarter as the US side has confirmed they will be making changes to how promoted listings work as there are a lot of low quality sellers ranking high in search by leveraging the program. While there is always going to be some lingering doubt as to whether or not one would have received the same sale had the listing not been promoted, the marketing costs can be very low while still giving a nice monthly boost to sales.

The sales below are in USD. A monthly breakdown is as follows:

June - $421.18
July - $622.47
August - $1280.98
September - $1017.24
October - $1474.42
November - $883.43
December - $1425.02

hlmacdon · ‎01-03-2020

As an illustration of the above, in the time it took to write the above post I had two sales come in. One of those sales had a promoted listing sale which included a further $70 of attached sales.

lotzofuniquegoodies · ‎01-03-2020

Thanks for your sharing your findings @hlmacdon . Most informative. In limited testing I've had 4 sales to date with promoted listings. One item sell on a fairly regular basis. The other 3 were more of the "unique" variety. 2 items were multiple unit listings with multiple items purchased at the same time. In searching with Google items similar often will not display as being too old on a regular basis. From my eye, promoted seems to work best with either extremely unique or high in demand items. I rarely have repeat customers. As stated in most advertising...Results may vary.

-Lotz

PS. Do you sell in 1 product line or various?

hlmacdon · ‎01-03-2020

I sell in a couple of related subcategories within the same overall category. I wouldn't describe the products as rare or unique, but they are the sort of products that you would typically be searching for with specific terms rather than browsing a general category. The key with promoted listings is to run them for a longer period. It's a bit like trawling the ocean for fish when you don't know where to cast your net. Unless you have high demand items the only thing that is going to deliver results is consistency.

reallynicestamps · ‎01-03-2020

More importantly a large percentage of promoted listing sales have generated multiple attach sales and have proven to be a good way of generating store browsing which leads to more sales activity.

I agree that higher fees do not seem to make any difference to views or sales.

I've stuck to one percent.
I don't Promote my best sellers (discount postage lots) and the items I am Promoting are, like @lotzofuniquegoodies , generally unique collectibles.

There is a definite uptick in sales since I started using Promoted Listings, nonetheless, I have yet to spend a whole dollar a month on PL fees. (Don't tell eBay about that.)

their browsing activity still remains via the search engine rather than natural browsing of favorite seller store sto see what is new.

I've suspected that for some time. I do get repeat customers, but most are new. Often they are also low FB, indicating new to eBay.
EBay seems to have run a (much derided) advertising campaign in the USA. Perhaps that has increased new buyers.

Meanwhile, US sellers remain terrified of low and zero FB buyers, based on posts to the dotCOM seller Board.

What is YOY?

The key with promoted listings is to run them for a longer period.

Which ties in with eBay's move to Good Til Cancelled listings.
I wouldn't see any difference with those, since I've used GTC since forever.

lotzofuniquegoodies · ‎01-03-2020

A good percentage of the Promoted listing searches routinely turn out to be of the offshore variety. They can afford to promote because of the volume of listings they are generally are running(volume purchasing power) and access to cheaper shipping. I also run across listings that state the item is located somewhere in a country called "Canada". Click on the listings, turns out it actually ships from China. In technical terms...A workaround.

-Lotz

reallynicestamps · ‎01-03-2020

"Afford to Promote"?

These listings only cost the seller if the item sells. So add the one (or five or seven) percent into the asking price.

That Chinese sellers are allowed to use Promoted Listings is no different than Canadian or German or Indian sellers using them.

The lies about location are another question and one that eBay really should be making a New Year Resolution to stop.

Not only because it means sellers with correctly identified locations are damaged by it, since our shipping costs seem so much higher compared to the "offshore Canadians"., but also because it annoys/infuriates buyers who face longer delivery periods and possible import fees on their purchases.

WHICH HURTS EBAY in case the powers that be think that the harm is only to Western sellers.

Perhaps Reports of incorrect location from buyers (as opposed to members generally) should be checked out on the first Report instead of the normal practice of waiting for several different Reports.
That is a reasonable policy for most problems, but by adding the "buyer" part to the reports there would be a certain amount of triage.

hlmacdon · ‎01-03-2020

YOY = Year over year, so comparing the same period in 2019 to 2018. Finishing up (5.9%) over the prior year for the latter half of the year given all the changes to the platform was a decent result especially in light that I kept a lower amount of listing inventory here compared to previous years. Without promoted listings I'm quite sure I would have finished down.

The majority of the new buyers I am attracting via promoted listings tend to be established accounts with a decent amount of feedback and a history of purchasing similar items but I do get the occasional very new buyer, although often I'm driving those customers to ebay. For me that is quite important as customers are likely to repeat buy given the nature of the product and niche. When you provide a better level of service and are confident buyers will stick with you if they'll just give you a shot then this is so far the most effective way I've found to get them to make an initial purchase. For most dedicated sellers I'm sure that is a real pain point when you know you have quality product at a fair price and provide a quality buying experience, more so when you know what the experience is like buying from some of your competitors. So far I've found promoted listings to help with that particular pain point versus something like discounting which isn't effective when buyers aren't noticing your product to begin with.

lotzofuniquegoodies · ‎01-03-2020

@reallynicestamps

The comparison I was trying to make was that a high volume seller can much more easily afford promoting their listings vs a small potatoes seller without even blinking. Gets them the added visibility with little loss. I have no major issue with sellers in N America selling high volumes. It's up to me to be as competitive as I can with that market. Not someone 1000's of miles away using incorrect location data to throw off searches.

As for the location issue, yes, that would definitely help if there a few checks and balances built into the system for the sellers using misleading locations in their listings.

-Lotz

hlmacdon · ‎01-03-2020

The lies about location are another question and one that eBay really should be making a New Year Resolution to stop.
Not only because it means sellers with correctly identified locations are damaged by it, since our shipping costs seem so much higher compared to the "offshore Canadians"., but also because it annoys/infuriates buyers who face longer delivery periods and possible import fees on their purchases.
WHICH HURTS EBAY in case the powers that be think that the harm is only to Western sellers.

Couldn't agree more. This needs to be policed. There are far too many sellers in China saying they are in Canada or the US, listing delivery estimates that are tied to domestic services then shipping direct from China via very slow and cheap methods. This can easily be policed on eBay's side by pulling the tracking data and running it against the account's listing history and they need to start addressing it. This goes hand in hand with the low quality accounts from that area that are buying their way in to top positioning via promoted listings and just flipping Taobao inventory they are claiming is in Canada and the US.

eBay's reputation has suffered in recent years as they've deemphasized seller quality in favor of flipping cheap junk at any cost. As it stands ebay continues to reward some of it's worst sellers while smashing their established sellers in good standing with nothing but a barrage of sticks while hiding all the carrots in a vault. One top executive was ushered out the door and more will follow if they continue down this path. When you focus on short term approaches to increase conversion or margins at the sake of reputation it damages the ecosystem.

hlmacdon · ‎01-03-2020

@lotzofuniquegoodies wrote:
The comparison I was trying to make was that a high volume seller can much more easily afford promoting their listings vs a small potatoes seller without even blinking. Gets them the added visibility with little loss. I have no major issue with sellers in N America selling high volumes. It's up to me to be as competitive as I can with that market. Not someone 1000's of miles away using incorrect location data to throw off searches.

If you focus just on price in some ways you are missing opportunity. You can have a very competitive price but if the algorithm isn't solely ranking on price and most buyers aren't straying away from best match then you are back at square one. As an example of this I have to compete with sellers in China on a daily basis and can't match them for price. Rather than chasing that I'd focus on figuring out how to get a bit more visibility while providing the best customer experience I can. A small difference in price while being able to deliver faster and with a better experience will often sway people, but only if my listing gets in front of them.

There are things you can do like adding a small handling charge to every listing to amortize that cost. Even in mass retail you are constantly dipping into other buckets of money to fund things like shipping or marketing. Rather than thinking the customer won't pay if you increase by x% give it a try and see what happens. To us an analogy, the products on endcaps in retail stores aren't always the best value, but they are coveted because they sell product, likewise product that is on shelves at eye level.

kawartha-ephemera · ‎01-03-2020

Good write-up.

It's only since sometime in October I've gotten seriouus with consistently using PLs on a portion of my listings but the results to date support most of your findings. Especially the bit about needing a great many impressions per click, the click-through rate is much, much lower with PLs. My sample size is still too small to draw any firm conclusions but so far conversions on PL clicks has been quite good. I've not yet had any of my regular customers use a PL.

Like many other small sellers who prior to the listing format change did not use GTC my account experienced a period of declining sales during the late spring and summer months. Very little of anything I listed GTC sold, eventually auctions became troublesome too unless it was something very attractive. To me there seemed a period where my listings and buyers were just not connecting somehow or other.

Then in October a flurry of good auction results in combination with a more ambitous PL campaign kick-started GTC sales. I honestly have no idea why exactly but since that time sales have been good, the majority are now GTC.

Did my beginning the serious use of PL influence the sudden return to normal sales? Who knows? All I know for sure is that the mere act of initiating use of PL resulted in a significant increase in search impressions which by itself is a good enough reason to play along on this.

The other clear benefit I see relates to cross promotion. Prior to the PL evolution ordinary listings had a good chance of being cross promoted on other sellers' listings, that pretty much disappeared in the last year. Sellers must use PL if they want to be seen outside of search these days. Perhaps this is part of the reason PL sales tend to be new customers.

reallynicestamps · ‎01-04-2020

I've never understood the dislike of GTC that seems to be based on how buyers react to it.

I very very much doubt that most buyers/browsers are particularly aware whether a listing is brand new this morning or has been hanging around for months or even years.

Full Disclosure: Almost all of my listings have been GTC for years. And my inventory slips (fancy name for a bit of paper with date of procurement) indicate that my items are as likely to sell after a few months as after a few weeks. Sales of items purchased years ago are pretty common too.

It is also possible that eBay's claim that the longer presence of GTC listings would mean that they would be picked up by Google and the like, might actually be true. The overlap with PL makes it harder to know.

lotzofuniquegoodies · ‎01-04-2020

For me as a seller my personal preference between 30 day listing vs GTC would be 30 day listings in heartbeat. With 30 day it was much more hands on. You could update listings as they expired. Change prices or just do general cleaning. Spot any errors and fix in real time. Choose which listings you wanted to give a rest to(Atleast for 3 months). As soon as GTC & Promoted kicked in my traffic slowed. As stated previously buyers find my items in eBay searches. Not vis a vie Google. My Traffic Report confirms that every month since GTC kicked in.

Now to throw another wrench into things I stumbled across this on dot com. First post was an announcement from 2017. Then there were several follow up discussions. And it reared its head again in 2019. Is this something we will have to be concerned with going forward? I believe I've seen posts on dot ca of sellers reporting listings that have taken well over a year to sell. Are listings suddenly going to disappear because according to eBay there was just no buyers. How much warning are sellers getting if their listing meets that criteria. Do they poof completely? Read and ponder.

https://community.ebay.com/t5/Announcements/eBay-Listing-Spring-Cleaning/ba-p/27039412

https://community.ebay.com/t5/Selling/eBay-now-removes-listings-that-don-t-sell-after-a-year-or-more...

See responses from Triton-eBay and Post 48 for 1 horror story.

-Lotz

PS. If someone wants to transfer this to a new discussion, that's fine by me. It's all related. Just thought of it when I saw the previous comment regarding GTC.

hlmacdon · ‎01-04-2020

@kawartha-ephemera wrote:
The other clear benefit I see relates to cross promotion. Prior to the PL evolution ordinary listings had a good chance of being cross promoted on other sellers' listings, that pretty much disappeared in the last year. Sellers must use PL if they want to be seen outside of search these days. Perhaps this is part of the reason PL sales tend to be new customers.

From a branding point of view alone that is important as even items without a MPN or UPC will get matched and cross promoted when the seller pays for a PL. I don't think they are as effective at selling the product but if everyone else is spamming your product pages you certainly want to do the same.

hlmacdon · ‎01-04-2020

@reallynicestamps wrote:
I've never understood the dislike of GTC that seems to be based on how buyers react to it.

People had a mindset that manipulating non-GTC listings would allow them to game the Newly Listed/Ending soon search filters for increased visibility. When the GTC transition happened sellers blamed that for the drop rather than the algorithmic changes that flowed around the same time. Like you I have sold GTC for an eternity and like everyone else my sales got smacked down at the same time. Promoted listings were a good way to get out of that hole and that drop is what spurred me into running a longer test.

Only a very narrow subset of buyers that still use newly listed/ending soon would care about the change, the others don't because they simply never use those options. Here and just about every other ecommerce site I've been involved in buyers rarely stray from whatever your default sort filter is unless it is completely nonsensical like showing discontinued product before in stock product. Buyers have gotten incredibly lazy as smart phones and tablets replace desktops and notebooks. The average buyer doesn't use the site like a seller would.

If you want any organic search traffic from outside of ebay short term listings do not work. Ebay has only had any significant search engine driven traffic when they've paid to export listings to google shopping feeds or paid for google adword campaings. Unfortunately prior marketing folks at ebay were fairly ineffective at this (historical adword campaigns were some of the worst run ones I have come across given how broad and untargeted) and they harbor some very bizzare views on SEO that are completely out of alignment with most other people in the industry. It comes down to not wanting to pay for advertising traffic and being forced into cutting marketing expenses. They are still doing what I would call some pseudo-black hat manipulation of the product catalog (there are alot of strange garbage product pages that look like they are purely designed to grab search engine clicks and redirect to other valid catalog entries) that I think is going to land them with a significant search penalty if they continue behaving like they are, but long term more permanent listings will stand a better chance of indexing and ranking.

Regardless of personal philosophy differences they are moving in the right direction. They aren't alone in trying to solve for this problem, virtually every ecommerce company I've been involved with fights the same problem, the difference being the focus is usually on curation and addressing site usability and that is an area where ebay isn't investing enough time currently. In the meantime promoted listings are a bandaid that can work. What is working against us is exclusionary filters based on shipping ETAs, and that tends to restrict your sales more than anything when there are other options for the buyer to choose from.

ricarmic · ‎01-04-2020

Thank you very much for sharing this information!

As you know from other threads I too have been experimenting with promoted listings with similar positive results and observations regarding new customers and repeat customers still reappearing via promoted as opposed to other ways (after the 30 day period).

4 of my last 5 buyers purchased promoted listings, and over a longer look 7 of last 20 were from promoted items.

Regarding GTC, I too have always used it. I have noticed that my regular buyers tend NOT to buy an item that is auctioning, they wait until it does not sell via auction, and then purchase it via GTC (I list the auctions at the same price I relist them as GTC if they do not sell). I presume they do this because they expect if they bid it will bring others and they won't get it or it will cost them more, which is probably true in some cases. This style of auctioning/GTCing tends to be another way to attract new repeat customers too, and the odd thing does sell higher due to bidding.

kawartha-ephemera · ‎01-04-2020

@hlmacdon wrote:
@kawartha-ephemera wrote:
The other clear benefit I see relates to cross promotion. Prior to the PL evolution ordinary listings had a good chance of being cross promoted on other sellers' listings, that pretty much disappeared in the last year. Sellers must use PL if they want to be seen outside of search these days. Perhaps this is part of the reason PL sales tend to be new customers.

From a branding point of view alone that is important as even items without a MPN or UPC will get matched and cross promoted when the seller pays for a PL. I don't think they are as effective at selling the product but if everyone else is spamming your product pages you certainly want to do the same.

It's impossible to know whether the PL clicks occured within search results or somewhere else. My personal thought is that the "Similiar Sponsored" banners appearing in other sellers' listings probably garner a decent amount of clicks. Even if those clicks don't lead to immediate sales at least users will be made aware of your presence, if they regularly see a seller offering items that interest them that has to raise their awareness of a seller's presence and brand.

jolp_emporium · ‎01-04-2020

I still struggle with promoted listings.. Whenever I choose to promote listing when creating the listing initially it does not work, it'll say something along the lines of "unable to process your request". The only way I've been able to create a promoted listing campaign in through ebay.com. These discrepancies have causes by to not take full advantage of promoted listings. Perhaps having an ebay store would make the process more user friendly?

I've been considering subscribing to an ebay store for awhile now..

Any thoughts on this?

reallynicestamps · ‎01-04-2020

Whenever I choose to promote listing when creating the listing initially it does not work, it'll say something along the lines of "unable to process your request".

That happens consistently on dotCA.

The notice seems to be a glitch, because the PL actually does show up almost immediately.

No the Store subscription does not make it more efficient.

I notice you have 87 listings - without a Store you get 50 Free Listings, but you can get another 50 still Free by listing them on dot COM.