eBay Opens Advertising to More Sellers

You don’t have to be a Top Rated Seller or Store subscriber in order to advertise your listings on eBay. The marketplace is now allowing sellers who are in “good standing” to use Promoted Listings, regardless of whether or not they have an eBay Store.

Last month, eBay CEO Devin Wenig had made it clear that he would focus on two areas to generate revenue as sales stutter: advertising and payments. Opening up the Promoted Listings paid-ad program seems an easy way to increase ad revenue. Not only will there be more sellers advertising, but increased competition may spur sellers to increase their spend, aka “ad rate.”

eBay Promoted Listings work differently than many other paid-ad programs. When setting up a Promoted Listing ad, eBay sellers set the ad rate as a percentage of an item’s final sale price (excluding shipping and taxes). If a buyer clicks on the promoted listing ad and purchases the item within 30 days, eBay tacks on the Promoted Listing fee in addition to the Final Value fee that sellers pay whenever one of their items sells.

Note that eBay launched a dumbed-down version for consumer sellers called Promoted Listings Lite in August, but it can only be used with the Quick Listing tool.

In January, eBay revealed that it had experienced nearly 150% revenue growth in Promoted Listings in the last 3 months of 2018, with 600,000 active sellers promoting 200 million listings. With today’s announced expansion of the program (see the eBay Announcement board), those numbers are likely to rise.

Ina Steiner

Ina Steiner is co-founder and Editor of EcommerceBytes and has been reporting on ecommerce since 1999. She's a widely cited authority on marketplace selling and is author of "Turn eBay Data Into Dollars" (McGraw-Hill 2006). Her blog was featured in the book, "Blogging Heroes" (Wiley 2008). She is a member of the Online News Association (Sep 2005 - present) and Investigative Reporters and Editors (Mar 2006 - present). Follow her on Twitter at @ecommercebytes and send news tips to ina@ecommercebytes.com. See disclosure at EcommerceBytes.com/disclosure/.