Advertising on eBay buys the click. Your listing and your warehouse decide the rest.

Many of the eBay sellers we talk to set one ‘General’ campaign at 5%, leave it running, and tell themselves they’re advertising. Technically, they are, but it’s rarely the kind of advertising that grows sales or controls cost.

In our latest virtual session, Tony Malone, Senior Advertising Account Manager at eBay, took us through the full advertising portfolio and where each one earns its place. eCommerce & Digital Administrator at StoreFeeder, Jack Liptrott, then showed how to manage the campaigns, listing quality, and order volume inside StoreFeeder.

‍The four ways to advertise on eBay

Tony described the portfolio as a buffet. Choose what fits your range and your budget instead of trying to use everything available.

• Promoted Listings General works like a billboard. eBay places your products across more than 35 positions on site, including search, competitor listings, and checkout. You pay a set percentage only when an item sells after a click, so you can fix your ad cost at 5% and know it won’t move. eBay reports 60% more clicks than non-promoted items.
  
  
• Promoted Listings Priority runs on a cost-per-click basis and buys the first ad slot in search. eBay attributes around 20% of its sales to that one slot. Sellers using Priority see over 80% more sales than non-promoted items, and adding it on top of General lifts sales a further 30%.
  
  
• Promoted Stores pulls traffic from search into your shop rather than just one listing. Once a buyer is inside your store, they’ve stopped browsing eBay and started browsing you, which is where cross-sell happens. It suits a clear brand or category better than a broad mixed catalogue.
  
  
• Promoted Offsite places your listings on Google and Bing. If eBay is your only sales channel, this method reaches buyers who start on Google and never search eBay at all. Fixed price listings only.

Advertising buys the click – your listing has to close it

Tony reiterated this point multiple times: advertising generates impressions, views and clicks, but whether any of it becomes an order depends on what the buyer finds when they arrive.

Buyers rarely scroll past roughly the top 16 results on page one, so being the cheapest seller on page two means nothing. Landing in slot one with weak photos, thin item specifics, or uncompetitive pricing also wastes the click you just paid for.

Two numbers will tell you which problem you have. The click-through rate shows whether buyers want to look, and the conversion rate indicates whether the listing persuades them once they do. Both sit in the advertising tab in Seller Hub and get far less attention than Return on Ad Spend (ROAS).

Advertise what’s already selling

The instinct is to put spend behind the stock that won’t move, yet Tony's advice swings the other way.

McDonald's puts the Big Mac on the poster, never the fish sandwich, because advertising accelerates existing demand – it doesn’t create demand that never existed. If a line sells ten units a day unaided, spending behind it multiplies that, and if it’s sat in the racking since spring, paid clicks won’t shift it.

Put Priority behind your hero lines, the products carrying the business this season, and run General across everything else.

50% off Priority ad fees until 30 September

eBay is running 50% off Promoted Listings Priority ad fees until 30 September for eligible business sellers, up to £2,000. The amount available varies by account, so check what’s showing in yours.

To ensure the discount is applied, navigate to Seller Hub > Selling > Overview > Promotions and activate the offer before creating your campaign. Any campaign created before activation will be ineligible. After enabling the promotion, you can either select one of eBay's pre-built campaigns or build a custom Priority campaign targeting your top-performing 10% to 20% of products.

Promotions and campaigns, visible in StoreFeeder

StoreFeeder imports your eBay promotions and campaigns and shows them against the listings they apply to. You get one view of what’s active and what’s paused and can apply a promotion to further listings. Since the data sits in StoreFeeder, you can report on which promotions actually performed.

Fixing listing quality at scale

The eBay listing health dashboard scores your catalogue and tells you what’s missing. Jack's example showed 3,500 listings at an average quality of 93.97%, with 369 carrying gaps and 500 missing item specifics.

Item specifics matter more than that score suggests: buyers filter based on them, so a listing without the right specifications never appears in the results those buyers are looking at. The second half of the dashboard groups the problem by field, so you can see if the Manufacturer Part Number (MPN) is missing across hundreds of products and fix it in one go rather than one listing at a time.

Filling the gaps got faster too. Search a product title and category, and StoreFeeder pulls the title, description, category, brand, colour, and item specifics back from eBay's catalogue into the listing. Jack's MacBook Air example took under five seconds and completed every required field. You still check it before it goes live, which is the same principle behind our wider AI listing tools: the system does the typing, but you make the judgement calls.

Handling the volume it creates

A campaign that works can raise unforeseen challenges for your warehouse, and the packing bench is usually where they surface first. Despatching from the app removes the walk to it: your picker scans the items, the order completes, and the label prints. At low volumes, that walk costs you nothing; at the volumes a working Priority campaign produces, it's the bottleneck.

Advertising, listing quality, and despatch are one chain, and paid traffic finds whichever link is weakest. Getting slot one is worth very little if the listing underneath it is thin, and a listing that converts is worth very little if the orders sit unpicked.

Watch the full session here, and if you want to be certain your operation can absorb what a working campaign brings, book a demo and we’ll walk through your setup with you.

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