Just because I haven't found (much) success selling print on demand on eBay doesn't mean you wont.
They reportedly get "106 million unique shopper journeys monthly" (source: ebayadvertising.com).
Actually, their statistics are pretty impressive all around:
- 2/5 of Americans Shop on eBay
- 182M global active buyers
- Second largest marketplace in the US
- 106M monthly uniques
- $22.6B eBay Inc. GMV in Q2 2019
* Ryan: Instantly questions why I haven't been successful selling POD on eBay *
Like any other platform, advertising is often a necessary step to achieve success as a seller.
Especially given the nature of print on demand, where the barrier of entry is very low and the only real up-front costs associated with operating a POD business are the listing fees associated with selling on a platform.
Lets learn more about eBay Promoted Listings to see if/how it can benefit our business.
Promoted Listings Fees
On most e-commerce platforms, you pay-per-click when advertising.
eBay operates in a different manor.
With eBay Promoted Listings, you bid a % of your listing's final value & only pay if a customer complete the purchase within 30 days of clicking your ad.
There are no setup fees, & no costs associated with clicks that don't lead to a sale.
It's a pretty interesting approach to online advertising.
And there's seemingly little to no downside in participating!
If you have a 30% profit margin built into a product, and you bid 20% of your final value, you'd be netting a +10% profit from each sale.
Given that I'm an eBay shopper, I've also noticed that like Amazon, running ads can mean that your product shows up in search results multiple times.
Do eBay Promoted Listings Work?
My general feelings towards them & selling POD on eBay in general is that most customers (like myself) come to eBay to save money.
Also, eBay's been desperately trying to shake their image as the "online auction" destination.
Until they do, I'm not sure what the real ceiling is for POD sellers, but generally speaking, I don't think it's very high.
They say that it can increase exposure by up to 36%, and my experiments with Promted Listings may support that claim:
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Here are my stats from the 8 campaigns I ran:
- Campaigns: 8
- Listings promoted: 5
- Impressions: 26,038
- Clicks: 137
- CTR: 0.53%
- Sold: 2
- Ad fees: $3.07
- Sales: $55.70
For reference, I just checked my most recent passive income report & on Etsy, my CTR was 1.37%, which is 2.6x higher
If I had to theorize why, I'd guess that it's because Etsy allows us to optimize our listings better for SEO, specifically by providing 13 tags.
eBay is primarily using your listing title to decide when our ads should be seen, assuming that our bid is high enough to garner a Promoted Listings placement.
How To Setup eBay Promoted Listings
My understanding is that in the past, you used to have to subscribe to upgrade your eBay store in order to use Promoted Listings.
This no longer appears to be the case, as I see options to promote my listings on various screens when I look today.
One thing that didn't change is that eBay's UI is really, really unintuitive & just bad in general when it comes to selling.
My recommendation is to bookmark this link to the Seller Huband use it as your go-to for eBay selling.
Also, check it semi-regularly, as they often run promotional offers that give you things like free listings (no listing fee).
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From your seller hub, you can click the "Promoted Listings" link to manage or edit your existing campaigns.
There are three ways that I primarily go about creating or adding a Promoted Listing campaign:
1) Promoted Listings Dashboard
Link: https://pls.ebay.com/plsweb/dashboard
Instructions: Use either the "Create a new campaign" button, or Action > Edit campaign on an existing campaign
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Then drag the slider or enter in your bid %, followed by clicking the "Update" button
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2) Revise/Create Product Listing
Link: edit the product listing you want to advertise
Instructions: Scroll to the bottom of the "revise listing" screen to the "Sell it faster" section. Check the "Boost your item's visibility..." box.
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Now set your bid. Unlike the previous example, you're only setting a bid for 1 item here. Before, you were setting a bid at the campaign level that would be applied to items contained within that campaign.
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3) My eBay Active
Link: https://www.ebay.com/mys/active
Instructions: Click the caret next to the "sell similar" button and click "Promote listing"
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Set your bid & click "Promote listing now"
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You should run some tests on a few of your best selling listings.
Unlike advertising on Amazon or Etsy where your Advertised Cost of Sale will be variable based on how well you convert customers & what you're being charged per-click, with eBay, your costs are already known up front.
So it's really a question of how effective the advertising campaigns will be, with little to no downside!
You can click here to read eBay's official Promoted Listings guidelines.
