Why eBay Promoted Listings quietly punish catalogue sellers
The sellers who defend eBay Promoted Listings most loudly are usually selling one of two things:
- fast-turnover, known-demand items
- or a small number of repeatable SKUs
For them, ads can make superficial sense.
Catalogue sellers are different and they’re the ones most quietly damaged by Promoted Listings.
A catalogue business works because of time, not force.
- Listings age.
- Data accumulates.
- Relevance compounds.
- Buyers arrive sideways, not directly.
Most catalogue sales don’t come from someone typing the perfect keyword. They come from browsing, comparison, curiosity, and association.
That’s why depth matters.
When you apply Promoted Listings to a catalogue, a few predictable things happen.
First, your best items get skimmed.
eBay doesn’t promote your weakest listings it promotes the ones already closest to converting.
So you end up paying an ad fee on the very items that:
- already had traction
- already ranked
- already benefited from catalogue age
The long tail doesn’t improve.
The head just gets taxed.
Second, you interrupt ageing.
Age is an advantage on eBay, but only if the system is allowed to learn naturally.
When ads are layered on top:
- attribution becomes noisy
- you stop knowing why something sold
- organic signals get blurred by paid ones
You haven’t accelerated learning.
You’ve polluted it.
Third, you flatten discovery.
Catalogue businesses benefit from sideways discovery: “people also viewed”, category browsing, visual wandering.
Promoted Listings bias traffic toward search-first behaviour, which rewards:
- obvious keywords
- generic phrasing
- standardised demand
Over time, your catalogue starts behaving like a thin performance funnel instead of a library.
That’s not an upgrade. It’s a downgrade.
Fourth, you normalise margin leakage.
Catalogue sellers rely on compounding small advantages:
- depth
- patience
- relevance
- time in market
Ads reverse that logic. They introduce a permanent toll on success.
The more something works, the more you’re encouraged to pay to keep it working.
That’s not scaling. That’s rent.
The most dangerous part is that none of this looks like failure.
- Sales still come in.
- Dashboards still show green arrows.
- Revenue looks “healthier”.
But the underlying engine gets weaker:
- less clarity
- less compounding
- less leverage over time
Catalogue sellers don’t usually crash with ads.
They just slowly lose the thing that made the catalogue valuable in the first place.
In the final post, I’ll spell out the only circumstances where I allow eBay Promoted Listings at all
and why “by default” is never one of them.
