eBay is readying a full launch of cost-per-click ads (CPC), a new model it announced during its seller conference on August 5th. Called eBay Promoted Listings Advanced, the ads give sellers priority access to the top of eBay search results pages.
With the CPC model, eBay sellers pay a small fee each time a shopper clicks on a promoted listing. Unlike the “standard” Promoted Listings program, which uses a cost-per-sale model, eBay will charge sellers for “advanced” Promoted Listings clicks, even if no sale results from the shopper clicking through.
The program is currently in beta and will roll out to eligible sellers later this year, according to Alex Kazim, Vice President of Global Advertising and General Manager.
With its usual knack for cutting through spin from ecommerce companies, the Marketplace Pulse blog recently wrote of eBay’s approach: “eBay is introducing more advertising types as sellers are increasingly promoting their listings. It hasn’t found a way to grow sales on the platform but is getting better at monetizing them.”
In Monday’s announcement, Kazim said eBay has partnered with third party service providers in the US, Europe, and China to make the new Promoted Listings Advanced CPC ads more widely available for sellers through APIs. eBay is working with ChannelAdvisor, Frooition, Just Applications, Pacvue, Push Auction, SoldEazy, Teikametrics, and TongTool.
“With these new collaborations, Promoted Listings Advanced will become more accessible for sellers who use these platforms every day,” Kazim said. “In the coming months, we’ll work with additional partners to integrate this product into their software.”
In Monday’s announcement, Kazim revealed some statistics: for the majority of eBay purchases, approximately 70% start from search, and one in five eBay purchases starts with a listing that appeared at the top of search results pages.
It would appear more ad models may be on the way: Kazim said the CPC ads were “the next step in developing a universal suite of advertising solutions for sellers seeking more preferred access and control in search rankings and budget planning.”
Read the full announcement on the eBay corporate blog.
CPC has put “in the grave”, anyone thats ever used it.
Theres zero transparency – other then what they WANT you to see – and giving CPC priority on the page undercuts everything eBay claims (looking at you Pierre) its about.
Though truthfully – eBays core values went up in smoke years ago – the proof in the pudding is what happened to the Steiners.
Yeh yeh – it was just an “isolated incident by a few rogue individuals” my @$$ – its eBays culture of corruption to be honest.
Count me out as a seller, and if I can figure out any vendor on eBay that uses it that has something I want – Ill go to the next guy and pay $5 just to cut eBay out ….. thats they way you do it ! (money for nothing and your clicks arent free) (hat tip to Dire Straits)
another way sleazebay sticks their slimy paws deeper into a sellers pocket.
This is nothing but yet another tool in eBay’s armoury to swallow more and more of sellers’ hard-earned return, and if you run the maths, you could quite quickly be looking at a scenario where the selling price of your precious item doesn’t actually cover the cost of eBay’s ever increasing charges, if you watch the expressions on Alix Kazim’s face as he’s trying to sell it to sellers, you can easily tell the size of the lie he’s trying to ram down your throat, this guy was brought back at a HUGE salary for one reason, and one reason alone; is to grab more of your hard earned cash
If you sell items with £200-£300+ price tag, the item will have 100s of watchers, and possibly 1000s of views before it attracts the person with the budget for the price, so you’re not only paying 11% +VAT for FVF, and 5% – 10% + VAT to make it somewhat visible, then a £150 +VAT for store rental, now they want to charge you every time someone looks at your item
So, for most of us mortals, our items start as hidden entities, then we pay to have them made visible, then when buyers try to look at them, you must pay again to allow buyers to look!
this is the epitome, and very personification of greed, and we don’t need to be reminded of how many were tossed on the bankruptcy heap through Google’s PPC, so that all their code writers can have a brand-new Ferrari each year
eBay will continue to push & push until there’s nothing else to aim for. We should all boycott this evil scheme, and force eBay to think again
I’ll share a little experiment I did with the previous advertising scheme, plain ol’ Promoted Listings (PL). I sell mostly clothing, very crowded category. Last year I started with a 1% PL across my entire store of about 400 items. Over the past 12 months my store has grown to over 1900 items, but the PL campaign has also been ratcheted up slowly until it was effectively around 15-20% on most items.
I started looking at the charts (I was an engineer in a previous life). Last year PLs were maybe 15% of sales. This year, they are 90% of sales! So a few weeks ago I pulled the PL campaign back down to around the 5% mark on most items. My sales remained the same. Impressions fell. BUT, the percentage of those sales that Ebay claimed were due to PLs went back down to about 15%.
In my mind, Ebay was really taking credit, and fees, for sales I was going to make anyway! The one number that didn’t change from high PLs to lower PLs was the number of Page Views, they remained about the same. In effect, I was just paying Ebay more without seeing an increase in sales.
So, do I feel psyched about another advertising method from Ebay? No. The problem is that Ebays platform doesn’t have enough buyers. They don’t market effectively to millennials. The pandemic gave them a random shot in the arm, but the platform is dying because they refuse to put any money back into it.
Besides, if I’m going to go the pay per click route, why not just open my own store on Shopify, which out ranks Ebay in terms of traffic, and use pay per click advertising there? At least then I could see deeply into the effectiveness of the campaign.
I keep hoping another company (I’m looking at you Paypal) would decide to compete head to head with Ebay. Competition is the only thing that would scare them into making the platform better. It would be real simple: somebody just start a simple reselling platform like Ebay used to be. Leave out all of the fancy BS, and just make it so that buyers and sellers can find each other easily.