eBay and Etsy Promoted Listings for Established Sellers

The first two points of ad rate: eBay's suggested ad rate is what other sellers in your category are currently paying, offered to you at the moment you are least equipped to argue with it. On a listing already ranked in the top handful of results for its main query, the opening percentage points of a Promoted Listings Standard rate buy placement the listing had anyway, and the fee is charged against the whole sale price. The judgement worth paying for is which listings should be promoted at all, and the rate at which promotion stops being a discount to buyers who were already coming. We make that call listing by listing, using organic position, sell-through and gross margin after final value fees. Listings with weak organic rank and healthy margin take Advanced, with keyword control and a bid held well below the suggested rate. Strong organic listings take Standard at a floor rate, or nothing at all. Auction-format inventory is handled on its own terms and rarely rewards the same treatment. Item specifics come before ad rate on eBay, without exception. A listing missing the specifics its category uses for filtering will not be rescued by paid placement, because the buyer never reaches the results page it would have appeared on. Where a catalogue has been imported from a webstore, the specifics are usually the entire problem, and we fix them before touching a campaign. Etsy is a different economy: Etsy Ads spend from a daily budget inside an internal auction, and a budget set too low is exhausted before the hours your buyers actually shop. That reads in the dashboard as poor performance and is really a scheduling artefact. We set budgets against your shop's own hourly demand curve and let weak listings fall out of the rotation rather than propping up a shop-wide average that hides them. Offsite Ads is not a channel decision. Once a shop passes ten thousand US dollars in sales across a trailing three hundred and sixty five days, the fee applies at twelve percent of attributed orders and the shop cannot opt out. Below that threshold the rate is fifteen percent with an opt-out available. So the work is pricing. The range has to carry that fee at the order values Offsite actually drives, which sit above your shop average more often than not. We model it before recommending a single change to your ads, and for some shops the answer is to raise prices and switch Etsy Ads off entirely. What we refuse: We do not advertise a listing converting below its category median. That money belongs in photography, the first image above all, and in price. Saying so costs us a management fee and it is still the right read. We do not buy reviews, feedback or engagement of any kind. We do not write keyword-stuffed titles; Etsy search rewards them briefly and buyers do not reward them at all. We do not take on stores sitting under a handling-time penalty until fulfilment is fixed. Not the right practice for you if: You are launching. New shops and new eBay accounts need sales history and feedback before paid placement does anything except subsidise their absence, and there is no engagement here small enough to be worth your money at that stage. Sellers wanting a percentage-of-sales arrangement should also look elsewhere. We charge fees, which is precisely what lets us recommend that you spend less.