Decided To Quit Selling on Ebay After 12 Years Because

of Promoted listings!! I have been selling on ebay for 12 years but have had enough now.

I sell 4 x different products for £2.99 and make £1 profit per sell, I sell around 40-50 products a day.

Well since ebay change the way promoted listings work (They take the top 5 spots) I now get about 2-5 sells a day. So I promoted my listings and now I make 0.30p profit per sell and sell 20-30 products a day.

So I have gone from around £1,500 a month profit to £300 simply because of promoted listings!!

Has anyone else been affected by promoted listings in this way?

What about selling through FB groups maybe?

Have you tried increasing your prices lol?

Sorry to ask, even though I've been on ebay since 2003 (but only started selling about 5 years ago)....can you explain more about promoted listings and how the changes have negatively affected you? What do you mean they only take the top 5? Were you always promoting your listings before but the cost has gone up?

I've never used promoted listings before. Your profit margin by % is good, but overall making 1 pound profit per sale is really tedious work to make 50 pounds (you'd have to process 50 sales). Even though I am a small time seller, just selling 3 or 4 sales can net me 50 dollars. I can't imagine processing 50 orders and shipping them out all just to make 50 bucks. If you are dropshipping or automating it, then I guess it's worth it.

Maybe you should try and sell different items so that those 2-5 sales per day can still net you $50 profit.

Ebay is a bad platform.

I should also add that I have been a power seller for almost of my time on ebay

t-machine said:

Have you tried increasing your prices lol?

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Yes ive tried to increase prices but noone buys when the price is increased

oatmeal said:

Sorry to ask, even though I've been on ebay since 2003 (but only started selling about 5 years ago)....can you explain more about promoted listings and how the changes have negatively affected you? What do you mean they only take the top 5? Were you always promoting your listings before but the cost has gone up?

I've never used promoted listings before. Your profit margin by % is good, but overall making 1 pound profit per sale is really tedious work to make 50 pounds (you'd have to process 50 sales). Even though I am a small time seller, just selling 3 or 4 sales can net me 50 dollars. I can't imagine processing 50 orders and shipping them out all just to make 50 bucks. If you are dropshipping or automating it, then I guess it's worth it.

Maybe you should try and sell different items so that those 2-5 sales per day can still net you $50 profit.

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I use to sell more expensive items but if you have 1-2 items go missing or returned it really affects your profit margin.

UserNumber3000 said:

Ebay is a bad platform.

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Its changed there policys so many times over the years its been hard to keep up.

Ebay has gone to shit lately with them always tweaking something. Always trying to squeeze more fee's out of sellers for the same or less sales.

I think you would need to open numerous accounts and play it that way which of course comes with all the fuck about of keeping the accounts separate.

jbarrett said:

I should also add that I have been a power seller for almost of my time on ebay
Yes ive tried to increase prices but noone buys when the price is increased
I use to sell more expensive items but if you have 1-2 items go missing or returned it really affects your profit margin.
Its changed there policys so many times over the years its been hard to keep up.

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Yes, it's true if an item goes missing or is returned, pricier sales can be bigger pills to swallow, but I think I've found a fairly comfortable margin.....nothing more than $100 items,
preferably not even more than $50. Most of my sales fall inbetween the $10 - $30 range and each sale I can make $10 profit. If I make 5 sales, there's $50.

I try to use shipping that always provides full tracking as much as possible and it really minimizes any issues of lost orders or not received orders. Also, over time, you'll have enough data to compile your own analysis to see what countries have excellent rate of successful deliveries and which ones are risky places and I cut off those countries that are risky. On average, I'd say for every 100 orders I ship out, I get about 1 or 2 cases / issues. Even at that rate, if I made 100 orders at $10 profit per, that's $1000 profit and count the 1 or 2 orders that you have to refund and eat the loss, that's only $40-$100 loss...then my net total would still be $900 profit. That's something you can live with it.

Just compile the data, and you can see how much you can afford to risk losing and still get a decent profit margin. I think in business it's something called, "acceptable loss".
Every company plans and prepares for acceptable loss. They always include that in their final numbers (how profitable something can be).

Try this method
Increase the price of the product, the amount you added for example 2$ add that budget to promote your listing, most of ebay buyers don't care about the price all what they wan't is quality and product that has been sold so many times before.
Also try to add the fastest shipping time you can do it that will help you to rank better

I built a simple spreadsheet to calculate all of ebay's fees, Paypal's fees, packaging, and shipping. I set the profit that I want and put it up and just let it set until it's sold. I leave e-bay just running on the back burner while I work on more productive platforms. I get the margin I want or I just let it set there. It's really just an email capture system for me. Plus, I do sell a few products.

t-machine said:

Have you tried increasing your prices lol?

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Buyers usually compare prices from other sellers. They will not buy.

What about a private storefront?

onlinemarketer12 said:

Buyers usually compare prices from other sellers. They will not buy.

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Sell something that they will buy. I sell a lot of graded coins and graded currency. Not everyone has the same supply of that. Something that they can search for and you are still in the market. Hell, the funny thing is, I buy at 1 auction site and sell at another just because people are too lazy to do a real search. They go to ebay and amazon and that is there searches. Lots of ways around it.

jbarrett said:

of Promoted listings!! I have been selling on ebay for 12 years but have had enough now.

I sell 4 x different products for £2.99 and make £1 profit per sell, I sell around 40-50 products a day.

Well since ebay change the way promoted listings work (They take the top 5 spots) I now get about 2-5 sells a day. So I promoted my listings and now I make 0.30p profit per sell and sell 20-30 products a day.

So I have gone from around £1,500 a month profit to £300 simply because of promoted listings!!

Has anyone else been affected by promoted listings in this way?

Click to expand...

Hi, I also sell on ebay and have actually increased my profits using promoted listings over the Christmas period. I listed gift items that I purchased for £1 and sold on ebay for £3.99 yet without promoted listings I would have hardly made any sales on them as their organic position in the listings was quite low down.

You say you only sell 4 products priced at £2.99 or was that just an example? As only selling 4 products is not a lot of inventory.
Lots of sellers have 100s or even 1000s of items for sale and spread their profits over some fast sellers with lower profits and more slower sellers but with higher margins per sale.