eBay Promoted Listings don’t create demand. They tax it.
This is a short, three-part essay on eBay Promoted Listings, not as a tactic, but as an economic mechanism.
It’s written from the perspective of running multiple, very different businesses on the platform, and from treating demand as something to be understood rather than forced.
The argument is simple:
Promoted Listings don’t create demand, they redistribute it and whether that helps or harms you depends entirely on the kind of business you’re actually running.
What follows breaks that down in three steps:
- what ads really do
- why catalogue sellers are uniquely affected
- and the narrow conditions under which I still allow them at all.
What ads really do
I see Promoted Listings discussed constantly as if they’re a growth lever.
They’re not.
They’re a tax and like most taxes, they’re easiest to justify when you don’t clearly separate demand from visibility.
Here’s the distinction that matters.
Promoted Listings do nothing unless a buyer is already searching for something.
- They don’t create interest.
- They don’t educate the market.
- They don’t turn a “maybe someday” product into a “must have”.
They simply insert your listing earlier into a demand stream that already exists.
That’s not inherently bad. But it’s not growth either.
Most sellers skip this step and go straight to results:
“I turned on ads and sales went up.”
Of course they did.
If you place yourself in front of existing demand and agree to pay a percentage of the sale, you will capture more of that demand, temporarily.
The mistake is assuming this means the business improved.
What usually happened instead:
- the same buyers bought
- at the same prices
- from the same catalogue
- with an extra fee quietly skimmed off the top
Nothing structural changed.
This is why Promoted Listings feel addictive.
They give you fast feedback without forcing you to answer harder questions:
- Is this item actually in demand?
- Would it sell anyway at the right price?
- Is my catalogue compounding or just churning?
Ads let you postpone those questions.
And eBay is very good at encouraging postponement.
- Suggested ad rates rise.
- Automation nudges appear.
- Dashboards imply that “visibility” is a problem to be solved.
But visibility is only a problem after demand is proven.
If demand doesn’t exist, ads don’t fix it, they just help you discover that more expensively.
The most telling sign that ads are being misused is this:
Sellers run them by default.
Default use is an admission that the underlying economics aren’t clear.
In my own businesses, I’ve learned to treat Promoted Listings as diagnostic tools at best, and as margin leakage at worst.
- They can tell you something, briefly.
- They can never replace demand.
- And they should never be confused with growth.
In the next post, I’ll explain why catalogue-based sellers are the ones most quietly damaged by ads, even when the numbers look “better”.
