Basic listings & price suggestions / removal from external channels
Summary: bixtron complains about hidden calculations of ad fees on eBay, even when a customer doesn’t buy directly through an ad. The user looks into whether basic ads that aren’t promoted on external channels are more effective. sammlerkiste-1-2-3 offers a strategy of pausing ads to avoid fees and shares successes in not being charged after ending ads. Both discuss at length the transparency and fairness of eBay’s advertising mechanisms and are dissatisfied with the practices mentioned, regarding them as misleading.
Hello everyone,
Not all that long ago, I sent someone my voucher, which they redeemed in the shop right away. Ad fees were charged late.
In this post, I showed that the ad fee was charged for another item, even though the price suggestion did not come in via an ad:
In both cases, you can of course argue whether the customer clicked on it once in the last 30 days. Still, I don't understand why sometimes a notice appears saying "price suggestion came in via ad" and sometimes it doesn't - yet it always gets charged.
In this post, I told the OP something:
Later, he buys one of my items. He sent a price suggestion (again, without any indication of an ad). From the username, I immediately recognized that it was the OP. Since the ad fees were once again charged to me late, I simply asked about it. This is what happened: the OP first accessed my shop and this listing via the forum and immediately made a price suggestion. He did not specifically search for this item in the search function, nor had he clicked on this listing somewhere at some point beforehand.
Of course, a click can always happen that you forget or don't even notice. But by now, the delayed charging is piling up exactly where doubts arise - otherwise the fee is visible right away...
The post on the help page:
"You only pay a fee if your item promoted with the base campaign strategy is sold within 30 days after a click on your ad."
So it really is now the case that the promoted item is always counted as long as someone interacted with the ad within 30 days - so it doesn't even have to be the buyer anymore. But then I also don't understand why I sometimes don't sell promoted items "via ads"(?) When it comes to price suggestions, it wasn't phrased so vaguely anymore:
That's exactly where the problem lies! Why should a transaction count as "sold via ads" if the customer themselves didn't even click on the ad, but someone completely different did? That just doesn't add up at all!
I'd rather see this as a kind of CPC model... (paying for clicks that didn't lead to a sale)
On top of that, there's also the fact that unpromoted items are actually counted too if the order contains a promoted item with which the ad was interacted within 30 days. At least I think I remember it that way - that already caused problems back when it was introduced.
What I did find now, though, is the option to exclude base ads from external channels:
I'm going to test that, because I think base ads work better when you focus them within eBay. After all, most promoted orders are not placed by new eBay customers, and external channels naturally have a much greater potential to "waste" the ads...
Still, I no longer understand what kind of ad system this is supposed to be. The conveyed "billing when: customer clicks on ad and buys within 30 days" is no longer what it is...
The topic of price suggestions makes absolutely no sense in my opinion and should be revised. Because right now you always pay the ad fee on price suggestions - no matter whether the customer interacted with an ad at all or not. What do the other users who interacted with this ad have to do with it? Do these users promote the listing through their interactions so that the actual buyer then purchases it? I don't understand the point behind it...
If a customer doesn't buy via the ad (without a price suggestion), nothing is charged either, even though the ad for this item had already been interacted with several times... Although, according to the help page, actually it should be... All very vague, the implementation is questionable...
sammlerkiste-1-2-3
·3 weeks agoThere is (unfortunately) a very clear rule:
If the item is currently being advertised with basic ads, then the commission is ALWAYS due, no matter how the customer came across the item.
If you're handing out vouchers, just pause ALL ads until the vouchers have expired, then start the ads again.
Pausing the ads in between makes sense anyway, because after a "restart" the items move further up again; the longer you let ads run, the further you slip back, unless you take the "horror amount" + 1-3% from eBay's suggestions ... unfortunately sellers from the Far East can do that, we normal sellers of course can't!
sammlerkiste-1-2-3
·3 weeks ago... I just noticed, we already had this question in another topic, sorry for answering twice!
bixtron
OP3 weeks agoAll good, it just obviously wasn’t communicated by eBay, because the help page doesn’t reflect it that way.
Pausing listings doesn’t help, since they keep being "promoted" for 30 days...
In what sense "end up further up" - it’s not a list that customers get to see...
sammlerkiste-1-2-3
·3 weeks agoNot that we’re talking past each other :-)
I mean the BASIC ads, where you only pay when a sale happens.
Theoretically you can turn them off for 5 minutes; if something is bought during those 5 minutes, you pay nothing.
The thing about the 30 days used to apply when you "only" got charged when a customer clicked on the ad.
Now they’re ALWAYS charging, and as I understood it, in "return" nothing is charged when advertising is paused
If this info is wrong, I’d be happy to be corrected !!!
bixtron
OP3 weeks agoHi,
this is also exclusively about the basic ads. I no longer use anything else.
My understanding is that the ads keep running for 30 days. In addition, the customer has already interacted with the ad beforehand - so if they buy within 30 days from that point, it gets charged. So I can turn off whatever I want - I don't think that will help.
I’ve just removed them from the external channels for now and will keep an eye on it; maybe that will push the ads more on eBay.
sammlerkiste-1-2-3
·3 weeks agoHi,
I even have a concrete case now.... I have a few watches that have been sitting in stock for "too long" and have long since been written off; I advertised them here with a very high listing fee (10-18% depending on the selling price), and for one of these watches a customer asked for a price suggestion of ~€130, whereupon I sent a price suggestion AND ended the listing, the customer bought it, NO listing fee was charged!
Hooray, that works, unless the "retroactive trap" snaps shut, which has already been reported here several times, namely that the fees only show up later, but I'll keep an eye on that and report back HERE if it didn't work and the eBay rip-off still got me.
bixtron
OP2 weeks ago · EditedHello,
Exactly. Take a look tonight to see whether it wasn’t charged late. Because that would mean that everything on the help page is a complete lie and that the enforcement of "basic ads" is pure fraud by eBay...
bixtron
OP2 weeks agoNow the question is of course.. Did this item have promoted views or interactions with its ad before, or not.
The help page says yes:
User A clicks on ad
User B sends price suggestion
Seller pays fee for promotion
You really have to let that sink in, how insanely eBay is now trying to keep money for itself and/or squeeze even more money out of us. They couldn’t care less anymore about how much morality, relationships, and rights are being violated...
bixtron
OP2 weeks ago · EditedYou also said that the calculation of ad fees always happens when an item is promoted. According to eBay, that’s not the case, and I have to disagree too, because I rarely sell promoted items organically.
At the same time, I now have another situation that makes me skeptical:
The same buyer/account. Buys the unpromoted item and then another accessory item. The fastest way for the customer to find item #2 (definitely not an impulse buy, since item #2 is needed for item #1) would be either the link in my description to the shop category or they click directly on my shop/my logo, whatever, to get into the shop.
According to eBay, though, the buyer has now interacted with item #2 in the last 30 days or bought it directly via an ad click.
That raises a follow-up question for me: Is the search results function within an eBay shop also promoted? (sorting by best results)... item #2 is in first place there.. Why?
The buyer knows that they get 15% off when buying 2 items and that any shipping costs are completely waived when buying 3 items - unless they didn’t read the listing, which I doubt in the case of the item and the age of the buyer’s account.
So why would the buyer use eBay search again to find item #2 if they were already right near my shop, where they could benefit from discounts?
I naturally looked at item #2 again. It’s also available for much less on eBay. So if the buyer had searched for the item in search, they would certainly have bought the much cheaper one - why would they then click on my ad and pay ~80% more?
The shipments went to different addresses - so combined shipping would not have been possible.
Of course, I can’t make sense of all this because eBay doesn’t provide any analysis, so now I have to decide what to believe. When situations like this or the thing with the offers suddenly get so out of hand, you have to assume that either something still isn’t working properly or it’s intentional...
bixtron
OP2 days ago · EditedWell, you’re probably right. If you turn off the option after receiving the price proposal, no fees are charged. Well, good for us - I’ve already saved myself €20 :)
Conclusion: Basic ads are pure fraud!