eBay Promoted Listings is a tool you can use to maximize profits and grow your business, and that goes for eBay too. There is no cost-per-click, only per-sale, and you can set the commission percentage as low as you need.
It’s just a feature provided by eBay to boost your sales and get your products seen by more people. If you were having a similar problem with sales on your own website, it wouldn’t seem strange to pay for additional marketing or advertising to boost sales. If your listings are not ranking highly, and you can afford to pay a few extra percent, it gives you a big leg up in the search results. eBay is a publicly-traded company and their objective is to make as much profit as possible for their shareholders.īut you can also see Promoted Listings as a marketing tool and a great opportunity to exploit. Many critics see Promoted Listings as just another way that eBay can profit from small businesses who are already struggling to survive. There’s listing fees, final value fees and PayPal fees on top of that. Yes, there are already fees to sell on eBay. You just have to periodically try nudging rates down to see if there’s an effect on sales. How do you know if a rate you set a while ago, by slowly building it up, is now higher than it needs to be? Unfortunately, you don’t. If you suspect that you are paying more than you need to, slowly decrease the percentage to see if you can make the same volume of sales at a lower ad rate.
They won’t tell you if you’re paying too much. eBay won’t object to taking a larger cut of your sale. There is no simple way to tell if you have set your Promoted Listings rate too high. Keep going in small increments, until you see a spike in sales. If there are no additional sales, increase it to 2%. Start with a low percentage, even 1%, and see how your items sell. To find the real cost, and avoid overpaying, you need to find the level yourself. The amount you need to pay to promote your specific items can be completely different to the category rates shown. However, despite the level of detail, these are still just category averages. The typical range is 5-10% but there are exceptions reaching as low as 2% and as high as 18%. To help answer this question, eBay provide average ad rates, updated weekly, across 32 main categories and hundreds of subcategories. That makes it easy to control the cost of Promoted Listings, in comparison to cost-per-click programs with variable pricing like Google Ads or Amazon Sponsored Products.īut to be successful – to actually get your item boosted to the top of the search results – you will have to compete against all the other sellers with similar items who are using Promoted Listings. You choose your own percentage rate for each listing, so you will never pay more than that.