Unfortunate Change to eBay's Promoted Listings Program

Attention eBay sellers! Brace yourselves because eBay is shaking up things again. Say goodbye to the good ol’ days of paying ad fees for just "direct" sales. eBay sellers will now be subject to "Halo Item" sales. And no, it's not related to that awesome game your nephew used to play. It's when a buyer clicks on a Promoted Standard ad and buys a different Promoted Listing Standard item within 30 days. 

See announcement

In other words, eBay will be charging you for the indirect impact of your advertising, making it even harder for you to know what orders and listings are actually making money.

So, how does it work? For some categories, it might be straightforward. Let’s say a buyer clicks on your Standard ad featuring a red shirt but buys a promoted blue shirt instead. In this case, eBay will charge you for the blue shirt you sold. The ad fee for Halo Item sales will be calculated based on the ad rate in effect for the sold item at the time of the sale. For the automotive aftermarket industry, we are expecting this to get pretty messy.

eBay also expanded its definition of a click for Standard and Advanced ads. This includes interactions with new features and functionality of your ads, like when a buyer clicks on the heart icon to add an item to their watchlist from a Promoted Listing.

According to eBay, this program has benefits in "illustrating a more complete view of the impact your Standard ads have on your sales." But, they also assure you that "you may see an increase in both your total ad fees and total items sold via Standard ads."

So HOW big of an impact will this have on your ad spend? We are curious too, so we are dedicating resources to help a select group of sellers figure that out.

Tromml is offering an exclusive opportunity for a no-cost analysis to see the changes to your promoted listings before and after this policy goes into place (limited to the first 5 sellers). 

Interested? Sign up here!