Rob & Melissa Stephenson from Flea Market Flipper talk about whether you should be using eBay promote listings for your flipping business.
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Should You Be Using eBay Promoted Listings?
Rob: What's up, pro flippers? On today's episode, we are talking about promoted listings, and more specifically, should you be using them with your eBay listings?
Rob: Alright guys, so today is everything promoted listings. Are you using them?
Should you be using them? Let's dive into this topic.
Melissa: Do you need to use them to have a successful business in 2023 right now? So, we wanna dive in. eBay started promoted listings how, how long ago have they started promoted listings?
Rob: It's been a while.
Melissa: It's been a couple years now. They didn't use to do it.
It used to be just a flat percent that you would pay them and then they came out with promoted listings 'cause then they can get more money. That's it. From every different little angle that they do. Double their income for sure. So, do you need to use them? It depends. So just the, the overall arching answer is it depends on your business.
Rob: So yeah. We sell low volume and high profit items. You guys should know that by now. If you're listening to this, if you're not, that's kind of our, game plan for our business is we sell less items, but we sell to higher price or a higher profit item. This is gonna be a little bit different for people who sell high volume and sell thousands or tens of thousands of items, it might be a little bit different than our opinion on it. I never list one of my listings with a promoted listing on it. I always started out where it's at. I list it for the price and I do not do the promoted listing if I check it within. You know, 20, 30 days and it has not got the amount of views to it or the watchers on it, then I might go in and promote it after that point.
Melissa: Yeah. I wanna talk a little bit about the business model too. So if you are new to listening, like our average sale price for our item, we sell around 80 to 120 items a year. Like that's kind of been our average and our average sale price it's been $1,100 to $1,400 per item. So that's kind of where we're at with our business is we do sell the bigger, they're typically larger items that go freight and they're worth more money. So that just it's a different business model if you are selling volume, so you might need to do the promoted listings, so.
Rob: Exactly volume, you're competing with a lot of, a lot of people, other sellers who are selling the same thing.
So you might have to do even the recommended. eBay will give you a recommended, amount that they want to promote your item for. So it might be 10%, 12%. We typically just start off with the minimum that they'll allow us to do. It used to be 1%. Now it's 2%. They won't let you promote for less than 2%. So if I do end up promoting a, a listing, I will start it at the 2% and see what kind of traction I can get with the lowest amount that eBay will let us do, which is 2%, like I said.
Melissa: Yeah. And you used to do it a lot more, and you have, you don't do it as much anymore, right? Correct.
Rob: No. Yeah. Like I said, when I list something for the first time, I do not mess with promoted listings, see if I can get it sold without promoted listings. And then, like I said, if I have to reevaluate, I will come back within 20, 30 days and look at it. If I am getting traction and I'm getting views and I'm getting watchers on it, I'll still leave it if I have to. But if I do want to throw in a promoted listings, I'll still only do it at 2% for eBay.
Melissa: Yeah. And one thing to note also, that if you want to get your stuff seen more, it might not, promoted listings might not be the answer first off. Or you wanna get it seen more, yes. And you want more sales, yes. So maybe it is just looking at your listings before you promote them. Like, I know it's, we don't wanna give eBay more money, but it's kind of easier just to promote them.
But maybe we need to reevaluate the listings itself. So something that can help is improving your pictures on your item, improving your title, improving your description, just really overall improving the whole listing so it gets searched more. So it shows up if you have more buzzwords in your title.
It shows up in more searches, and yeah. Did you have anything to add to that? Sorry. I was, yeah.
Rob: Titles, titles definitely are a big thing because when somebody is searching for something on eBay, they're using that search bar, and if you don't have a word in your title that somebody is looking for and they're typing it in the search bar, you're, they're not gonna see your item.
So titles are very, very important before you do try to promote a listing. Make sure you're using the majority of the buzzwords that you can that will attract those potential buyers. Pro tip, I'll give you a little for instance or a good practice to get into if you are selling something for us.
Like I said, we're selling the higher profit items. If you are selling one, go and look at completed listings when you're doing comps on it. Check what their titles are, how did they attract the buyers? And make sure that they're sold. Make sure they actually sold. Find out how they attracted the buyers to their item.
Make sure you have those buzzwords in your title as well. You definitely wanna do that. You want to be grabbing as many people off of that search as you possibly can. And like Melissa said, sometimes it might not even help. If you do a promoted listings, if you don't have the right title in there that people can find there, there, you're not gonna get sales from that.
So that's the first thing that we would recommend is check the listings. Check the descriptions, I mean the titles, check the descriptions and the pictures, and throw a video in there if you can. If it is a more high profit item, throw a video in there. That's what's, really turning people's heads right now, is being able to see the item, see everything on the item that it works, that kind of stuff. So.
Melissa: Yeah, I was gonna add that, add the video. Cool. But the pictures are so important too, because we see so many different listings that come through and it's. Still surprising that sometimes there's still, the pictures are not the best, like they're, there's clutter maybe on the side. It's not, and we're not saying they need to be perfect.
Like we still, we just use our, the phone. The phones have amazing cameras. They do. And we just use that. That's what we use. That's what we've used for years and you can take good pictures. You just don't wanna have clutter. You don't wanna have like other stuff, even if you have to crop the picture so you get other stuff out, you know, brighter lighting a little bit.
It doesn't, but they don't have to be perfect. So don't let, like, I don't have the perfect lighting set up for my items. Don't let that stop you. You can use a lamp, you can use, make whatever work, but you do wanna make sure that your pictures look decent, because that's really what sells your item, because nobody can see it before they buy it.
They're just looking at your pictures and your video, and that's the only thing they're going off of. So, absolutely.
Rob: So, so to recap, we do not use promoted listings when we list an item the first time. Is it right, is it wrong? We don't know. That's just what our practice is. I don't wanna pay eBay more money than I have to.
Nope. So the first thing is we do not, we try to make sure the title, description, the title, the pictures and the description, all that are very accurate and that they're attracting people in. So first off, we don't use promoted listings if we have to reevaluate 20, 30 days, maybe even two months.
If it is something that has not sold, we might promote it, but we do it at the lowest amount that eBay will allow us to, which is 2%. And you should be able to change that. If you go to promote your listing, they might recommend you doing it for 12%. You should be able to change that down to 2%, and pay that out for the promotion until it goes to three, until they start going up higher and higher.
4%. But yeah, I think that is the best recap. And this is for our business model. This is for people who are selling less items, higher profit items. If you are selling volume, like we said, it would be a little different. It might be different. You might have to promote it to get it in front of your competition.
You might have to do that right now because I think that's what eBay's really shooting for. Yeah. To really get your items sold, they want you to promote them.
Melissa: One more thing that does help your listings is also keeping your account in good standing. So making sure that you stay at a top rated seller or you know you're above standard in your account 'cause then your listings do get shown to more people versus if you start getting more negative feedback or you're not shipping out on time, your account will get dinged and you won't get your stuff is seen in front of many people.
Rob: Such a great point. Under promise, over deliver with everything that you do, and make sure you're shipping out on time for what you're telling people that you're doing.
If you're doing it within 24 hours, do it on time. Under promise, over deliver. That's our biggest motto around here. We want people to be happy, so they're giving you positive feedback. You're building up your credibility with eBay. That's what you wanna do. Absolutely.
Melissa: Yeah. And guys, we are so excited. We are about to jump into a free challenge coming up in a couple weeks. Woo-hoo. So if you wanna check it out, we wanna help you get your first $250 from reselling. So you can check out learnthenumbertwoflip.com and get registered for that challenge.
Rob: That's awesome. We're gonna have so much fun guys, and we cannot wait to see you there.
Thanks for joining us on this episode, and we can't wait to see you on the next episode.