eBay promoted listings are a bit like being an athlete who’s won several big events: you might get a few interviews, better start times or positions, and maybe some extra perks to help you keep succeeding. You’ve proved you’re a winner and there’s more curiosity about what you can do next, and selling successfully on eBay is the same thing. Want to know how to get covered under eBay’s promoted listings? You’re doing the right thing with this first step: researching things with RepricerExpress.
What Are eBay Promoted Listings?
Because eBay promoted listings target the best of eBay sellers, the ones who have a proven track record of doing well, you’ll want to treat your products the same way. This means showcasing items that are hot and desirable and worthy of the ‘promoted listings’ title. But just in case your definition of this doesn’t align with eBay’s, here’s the kind of things they’re looking for:
- New listings — not always or necessarily new items, but rather listings you’ve just curated for the first time.
- Favourite sellers — if you’re selling an item that has been popular for a long time, whether in the general supply-and-demand way or just on your page (think of something like a MacBook laptop), this type of product tends to get featured regularly under-promoted listings.
- Popular seasonal items — go with the mindset of things like mittens or snow shovels in the winter, sunscreen in the summer or rakes in the autumn, and you’ll be on the right track to having your item featured in promoted listings.
- Half your listings — maybe you want total control over which items go into promoted listings. eBay lets you do that in one of two ways: either any 500 of them or half of the total number of your listings, whichever number ends up being higher.
- Items that can absorb a little more cost — unfortunately, eBay promoted listings aren’t free and you’ll have to pay the marketplace anywhere from 1-20% (you choose) of the final sale price. Carefully select which items you think can handle this extra cost, and carefully plan how much coverage in the way of money percent (fee) you think each item can benefit from.
Do eBay Promoted Listings Work?
Remember how we said eBay promoted listings go hand-in-hand with eBay’s top sellers? It’s not because this is some secret service available to just the top 1% of eBay’s sellers, but rather something the top eBay sellers tend to take advantage of to make them even better. It’s kinda like the difference between a wealthy person hiring an accountant to do their taxes and find all the loopholes so they can put more money back in their wallet, and a university student doing their own taxes to save money on paying an accountant.
Related: How to Use Amazon Sponsored Product Ads
Top Tips to Get the Most Out of Your Promoted Listings
We’ve already gone over the types of items and listings that can most benefit from being promoted, but how do you actually put this into practice and streamline the process as efficiently as possible? Essentially, two steps: plan and research, then test and track.
- Plan and Research: If you look at any successful retailer, you’ll notice they have targeted campaigns to capitalise on sales throughout the year. Turkeys get advertised and put on sale around Thanksgiving and Christmas, not at the beginning of summer. Do the same with your listings and figure out when you want to host your own campaigns, such as circling them around holidays, major events or the seasons.
- Test and Track: Your dashboard should become one of your best friends, as it contains all the objective data you need to measure your performance, both in the positive and negative. If you’ve put a bunch of seasonal listings up for promotion and they’re just not selling well, check your dashboard and analyse why that’s happening. Then, make minor adjustments until you settle on the perfect formula. You never want to make major or inconsistent changes because then you’re introducing too many variables and you won’t really have an idea of what you’re doing right and what you need to fix.
Final Thoughts
It can be a little tough to find your rhythm and really get going, but one thing that’s about as close to a sure-fire winner as you can get is using RepricerExpress to compete aggressively with other sellers. You’ll have hot prices, which will draw more eyeballs to your page and in turn, potentially increase the number of sales. But unless you’ve started with your 15-day free trial, that’ll never happen for you.
Related: A Sellers’ Guide to eBay Arbitrage
