Promoted Listings Standard fees are changing ... Again!

[kawartha-ephemera]

Just received some unexpected news via ebay message, have pasted some excerpts below. The emphasis are mine.

What’s changing?

As we continue working to help make your ads more engaging and helpful for buyers, we will be expanding our definition of a click for Standard and Advanced ads to include interactions with new features and functionality of your ads. In addition to when a buyer clicks through to your listing page, we will now include when a buyer clicks on the heart icon to add an item to their watchlist from a Promoted Listing.

We will be expanding what we qualify and report as an Attributed Sale for Promoted Listings Standard to include when a buyer clicks on one of your Standard ads and then purchases any of your Promoted Listings Standard items within 30 days.

These changes, along with our updated Marketing Program Terms, will take effect on March 30, 2023. You can find the updated terms, along with the current terms, on our Marketing Program Terms page.

Seller announcement: Promoted Listings Standard fees are changing - eBay Ads

[ricarmic]

@kawartha-ephemera 

Yes you've almost exactly described my current and future process, my "tailings" % is higher, but I sell a lot of unusual stuff that it takes a while for the right person to find it.

[brettjet38]

@lotzofuniquegoodies "Pretty much the opposite. If everything is promoted the only parties that will win are sellers that can promote at the highest rate and eBay."

That is the basic idea, you "Pay to Play" and the one with the deepest pockets wins...

...eBay also, a .05% here, er sorry where are we now a minimum of 1%, 2%, soon the minimum for promoted listing will creep up too 5%, you know eBay a few pennies here, a few pennies there, oh FREE LISTINGS!

[flipistics]

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@kawartha-ephemera wrote:

I wish we had access to real traffic data, it would be nice to have some insight into how buyers find our listings and store, and what their behaviour is like once there.

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Supposedly we will have access to a lot more data when it rolls out. That will be very important in determining how to proceed with promoted items. I'll believe it when I see it though.

[kawartha-ephemera]

Have I missed some news, announcement etc. Whatever may arrive I sure hope it's not more Terrapeak gumbo.

[flipistics]

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@kawartha-ephemera wrote:
Have I missed some news, announcement etc. Whatever may arrive I sure hope it's not more Terrapeak gumbo.

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It's kinda buried in a link in the email.

https://www.ebayads.com/2023/02/15/seller-announcement-promoted-listings-standard-fees-are-changing-...

"Previously, we only reported a sale and charged the ad fee if the same buyer clicked on a Standard ad and purchased that same item within 30 days, also known as a Direct sale. This model didn’t account for a buyer clicking on one of your Standard ads and then purchasing a different promoted item from you. Since the buyer originated from a Standard ad and came back to purchase another Promoted Listings Standard item in your collection, there is a broader effect your Standard ads have. New reporting will show the wider impact of your advertising spend.

...

To view which sales are Direct vs Halo Item sales, see your Sales report, accessible from your advertising dashboard."

I took that to mean we'd have access to more information about how buyers find and look through our stuff. We'll see what we actually end up getting access to though.

[lotzofuniquegoodies]

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@flipistics wrote:

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@kawartha-ephemera wrote:
Have I missed some news, announcement etc. Whatever may arrive I sure hope it's not more Terrapeak gumbo.

---

It's kinda buried in a link in the email.

https://www.ebayads.com/2023/02/15/seller-announcement-promoted-listings-standard-fees-are-changing-...

"Previously, we only reported a sale and charged the ad fee if the same buyer clicked on a Standard ad and purchased that same item within 30 days, also known as a Direct sale. This model didn’t account for a buyer clicking on one of your Standard ads and then purchasing a different promoted item from you. Since the buyer originated from a Standard ad and came back to purchase another Promoted Listings Standard item in your collection, there is a broader effect your Standard ads have. New reporting will show the wider impact of your advertising spend.

...

To view which sales are Direct vs Halo Item sales, see your Sales report, accessible from your advertising dashboard."

I took that to mean we'd have access to more information about how buyers find and look through our stuff. We'll see what we actually end up getting access to though.

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@flipistics 

Scary to think it but next will be accidental hovering over a listing will count as "click". Similar to a drive by click or even window shopping? My concern is will we ever be able to fully trust these stats as being 100% legit? Do you think eBay could give us the names of the clickers?

-Lotz

[flipistics]

Scary to think it but next will be accidental hovering over a listing will count as "click". Similar to a drive by click or even window shopping? My concern is will we ever be able to fully trust these stats as being 100% legit? Do you think eBay could give us the names of the clickers?

-Lotz

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I would suspect that with these changes, we'll probaby see the vast majority of sales be from promoted listings anyway (assuming we promote). Whether we can trust the stats or not is probably irrelevant.

[kawartha-ephemera]

@flipistics wrote: I would suspect that with these changes, we'll probaby see the vast majority of sales be from promoted listings anyway (assuming we promote).

No doubt that's the intent of the attribution definition change, they probably foresee this doubling their PL Standard revenue. Both gross merchandise sold on the marketplace and company revenue shrunk once again last quarter. Considering the natural upward effect inflation has on gross merchandise sold the continuing downward trend is concerning. IMO at least some of this problem stems from management's stated policy
regarding their 3rd party advertising spend, ie: google and other 3rd party referral sites. In a nutshell, they hope to replace that 3rd party spend with in-house PL ad revenue, in other words replace advertising expense (referral commisions) with advertising income (PL fees). So far they've managed to more or less keep company revenue and profits from crashing. I doubt most sellers have found the combination of ebay's declining external ad spend and their own steeply increasing PL fees to be beneficial. It's worth reading the company SEC filings to try and gain some idea of what is going on here.

An interesting tidbit, these guys just finished selling off huge chunks of the company for billions, yet during the latest quarter they issued more than a billion in new notes. Still managed to scrape up cash to buy back another $400 million worth of shares and pay a nice dividend to boot though. Doesn't seem prudent to me considering the shaky GMV foundation upon which the company's revenue depends.