Sponsored listings will finally sink eBay
Good morning everyone, I’ll start by saying I’m venting from a “clean” account because I’m just a regular employee and I can’t put myself out there on behalf of the company I work for.
My job is to take care of the eBay listings, check that everything is in order, descriptions, images, prices and, unfortunately, lately also promotions.
We’ve been present as professional sellers on eBay since 2015, always in the toys and model kits category, with excellent results both in terms of customer satisfaction and sales, but recently the situation has deteriorated to the point of becoming frustrating.
As of today, with sponsored listings in full swing, the search engine simply works by “hiding” anyone who decides not to pay (sometimes the search results don’t even appear if you set the filter within 10 km of our ZIP code), and by letting promoted bids run free, shameful average percentages are reached.
In the categories we sell in, the average ranges from 8 to 10%, to which you have to add the default 12% that we pay as professional sellers... talking about products where we have a 15% margin selling at list price, you do the math...
The solutions my colleagues have come up with are wonderful and creative, like the very popular move of switching to a private store even though we’re talking about LLCs or, in any case, fully-fledged professional businesses (and if you happen to try reporting these sellers, the official answer is “this is allowed by eBay”)
There used to be rules, like on pre-orders at max 30 days, on identical listings, etc. One report was enough and they would remove the listing; now I find pre-orders 5 months out or items not actually available being sold anyway with 30 days for shipping, so they can get them via drop shipping or, at worst, cancel the order.
Behavior like this causes defects, and up until last year accounts with defects were penalized... now all it takes is promotion and you’re still the top result.
So go ahead, let’s take away customers’ guarantee of professionalism, raise prices, deliver crappy service, as long as you pay eBay allows it, all while the marketing bigwigs celebrate the huge success of the promo to bring the “private sellers” back to eBay... too bad that this way it will lose the professionals and, above all, the buyers!
- Claudio -
worldcustomchopper
·2 years agoHi Claudio, my name is Mauro... I read your post and I’ve been an Ebay seller for twenty years and I have to say I completely agree with what you wrote...
personally, what disappoints me most about ebay these past few years are the expensive and misleading sponsored listings... if all of us sellers opted for sponsored listings, where would they put us front and center like they say??
Then they told us that with the new Ebay payments, by ditching Paypal we could finally earn a bit more since Paypal fees would be nonexistent... but after all that they stuck sponsored listings on us; to me this means it was all planned and thought out already, I’ll never do them... since I sell items with an average cost of 50 euros including shipping, if I did sponsored listings I’d feel like I wasn’t an Ebay seller but an Ebay employee, and unfortunately the numbers just don’t add up...
I hope for a better future so that Ebay can stay in my heart...
Best, Mauro
heavenwelkin
·2 years agoThat said, every search term is its own world, but......
Try searching on eBay for "men's shoes size 42", narrowing it down to "Italy only", 64,000 results....
If you consider that the average user loses interest after 3 or 4 pages and if they don't find something they like the purchase doesn't happen.
This is where the need to "stand out" comes from if you want to hope to sell something in this specific search I did.
It's true that the more sponsored listings there are in a given category, the more this option loses effectiveness, but with 64,000 results what alternative solutions are there to make sure a seller can appear in the first 3 or 4 pages ?
Ok, people don't like sponsored listings, but you also have to be realistic.
There would be a FREE alternative solution, but it still wouldn't be DEMOCRATIC because it would create sellers of class A, class B, class C, etc.
Basically you'd need to create an algorithm (like the one implemented by another marketplace) that in certain categories gives priority to the listings potentially most in demand, analyzing the keywords, photos, and other parameters; these listings would appear ahead of other listings because they would potentially be the ones most searched for / most appealing to users.
Best regards.
prettyd_63
·3 years agoI am not a professional seller, I’m a private individual, and honestly, I think the world economy and online shopping are headed for a deep crisis. The fewer customers and sellers there are, the more they’ll raise the cost of everything..
In my specific case, I’m a hobbyist who, every now and then a few years ago, sold something and the views were enough to make a sale.
After 3 years of trying to list items for sale again (for now just some heads), I notice that the views for an item listed for sale are equal to "0".
And the first thing eBay suggested to me was to activate promotion. I don’t agree with paying another 5 euros to get some visibility.
We already have very high taxes in general, scary shipping costs, and expenses of every kind. Earnings on eBay are minimal by now, and I don’t want to activate promotion.
There’s something different, I don’t remember, 3 years ago, all this difficulty in getting at least views.
Today it’s not just hard to sell, but also to get a bit of visibility.
I think I’ll try to sell only to a few people and privately from now on.
I hope eBay understands how serious the problem is. But given the crisis times we are already in and the ones that will come, much more than now, I doubt there will be any recovery for the economy, in any field.
The economic crisis inevitably leads to making choices that in the end still don’t lead to solutions. In short, you end up in a sort of infinite loop..
Meanwhile there’s no way to get visibility and I activated a new Postepay Evolution for practically nothing...
actar80
·3 years agoThe economic crisis has affected everyone, as have some European rules that have changed, bringing restrictions and increased costs especially for sales outside the EU.
The problem with eBay is that it is deaf. Even if you contact the assistant who no longer replies to you from Italy, the discussion will probably remain between you without being directed to the higher-ups. Yet I read some time ago that eBay has a higher profitability index than A...zon precisely because it does not invest in support, unlike A...zon. At this point all that remains is to wonder how long those in charge at eBay will remain deaf to users' complaints/requests.
prettyd_63
·3 years agoSorry, I was hasty; actually, I contacted eBay, and they explained the situation to me better. It seems that it depends on the type of my items, among other things; at the moment especially, what people are searching for does not match what I list. In fact, they are not very sought-after items, so now it is clearer. I’ll try with other items and something more inherently visible and sellable. These days, I think there’s very little demand for just about everything, and so I got the impression that it depended on eBay. eBay, on the other hand, has added sponsored listings precisely to help with visibility, to deal with this trend that had already started a long time ago. All we can do is be patient, and maybe come up with new ideas to face this very difficult moment for everyone 🙏
actar80
·3 years agoEven better then, add some more appealing items so that potential buyers will also check out your other listings.
heavenwelkin
·3 years agoGood evening prettyd_63
In fact, the heated mat for dogs and cats and the dolls manual / magazine I don't know how much they could be in demand....
Best regards.
heavenwelkin
·3 years agoGood morning Claudio
In these DIFFICULT times I leave you with this quote.
Kind regards.
actar80
·3 years agoUnfortunately things have been getting worse for a few years now... and wait and see what happens as soon as they eliminate PayPal for buyers as a payment method too, there will be another drop in sales. Since they removed PayPal, many private sellers have disappeared, especially in the toys and model kits category that I’ve followed from the start, and in vintage.
A private seller is not always willing to provide the IBAN of their bank account (which you then can’t remove, only change, see the discussion in the link below), nor are they willing to bear the costs of a card with an IBAN like Postepay Evolution, which has also gone up to 15 euros a year, just to occasionally sell something they have on eBay. What happened? Many private sellers I followed disappeared, “0” listings!
https://community.ebay.it/t5/Strumenti-per-la-vendita/Attenzione-a-collegare-il-conto-corrente/td-p/943443
Then add the fact that they removed the one-time code to contact support, now based only abroad and often not very competent (they gave me wrong information or I even had cases where they didn’t know how to answer), so the difficulty of getting in touch with support by phone and the increasing reliance on the community, and there you have it!
The count/view system has changed too, and as you say the sponsorship system is full of holes. In short, things are going badly but it doesn’t seem to matter to anyone.
I understand the outburst, totally understandable, but I have little hope they’ll come to their senses up top. If I were you, I’d look for some alternative workaround to sell, because I’m convinced there will be another drop in purchases when PayPal is excluded for buyers; then we’ll see, of course, but in the meantime it’s better to have alternatives. I hope you manage to bounce back, since for you it’s work, while for me selling and buying was a hobby.
Have a good day
cla3699
OP3 years agoin fact nowadays real private sellers are very rare and between the fake ones and the homemade dropshippers with "amazon supplier" the quality of the platform is scraping the bottom... anyway fortunately ebay isn't our only sales channel so we'll stay at least for all the loyal customers who follow us (and are still able to find our shop despite the search engine)
actar80
·3 years agoI agree with you!
I’m not happy with all the downgrades that have taken place on the platform over the last few years, and I hope it returns to its original spirit, but if it keeps going like this many will move to other, leaner channels... in the end success or decline will be determined by mass shifts of buyers, and as I was saying we’re waiting to see Paypal excluded for them too. Have a good evening.
heavenwelkin
·3 years agoIf a seller sells accepting Paypal outside of ebay, in case of a return due to buyer’s remorse or non-compliance, Paypal still withholds the fees collected of 3.4% (up to 2500 euros) and does not refund them.
I don’t know what agreements there are with ebay and I don’t know whether, in the case of a return due to buyer’s remorse or non-compliance, the fees are currently covered by ebay or Paypal (for Paypal it wouldn’t be a cost); the fact is that by now Paypal is no longer a competitive platform.
From the seller’s side, if they removed Paypal nothing would change, since the seller no longer has anything to do with Paypal since 2021.
From the buyer’s side, however, there could be problems getting past the various anti-fraud protections like 3D secure, where authorization for the transaction is requested via token or SMS code, whereas with Paypal the payment process is simpler.
From the buyer’s side, a certain rapport or habit of using Paypal could also disappear for buyers who feel safer and more protected when they don’t want to leave their credit card details all over the web, and at the same price buyers might prefer to buy elsewhere with Paypal.
Kind regards.
actar80
·3 years ago