eBay Promoted Listings Problems

I've noticed an uptick in the last few days of sellers posting in the community about technical problems with Promoted Listings.

kym219 posted this on the Technical Issues board on 4/30/21

Over the last 2 days, all my new listings are showing as eligible to promote even though they are promoted in the listing. When I click "promote listing", it says they are not eligible. This typically happens but clears about 5 minutes after I've listed the item. Now, none are clearing, even after a full 24 hours. I've been promoting listings for over a year now and have never run into this. Has anyone else run into this? (I only use my desktop for listing, not the app).

Multiple other sellers chimed in saying they were experiencing the same issue.

jhb2021 was able to find a manual work around, but apparently it only worked on individual listings, not bulk updates, making it a tedious solution at best.

I went back into my listings and revised each listing individually to NOT PROMOTE down at the listing form. I then brought up my active list that showed the items as eligible to be promoted. I changed each listing individually through the eligible list and did the promote piece like I was doing it from scratch. I've tried it on 2 listings and its worked so far. It looks like the section on the bottom of the listing form is not connecting to the campaign, so you have to find another way to get to it. Don't know if this helps anyone, but thought I would share it....

kym219 confirmed the manual workaround was working for them as well and they had reported the issue to eBay support.

Sorry to take so long getting back!! I didn't have any notifications that anyone was commenting on my post.

I chatted with customer service and they said it was a known issue. Then I chatted with eBay for Business on Facebook and they had never heard of it.

What I ended up doing (and it worked for me) was to bulk edit and turn off all promoted listings. When I tried to bulk edit and turn them back on it wouldn't work. But then I was able to promote in the PL column on the seller hub listings page. I has to do each one individually. Ugh. I have 613 listings so what a pain in the butt. Hope you don't have a lot more than that. After doing it that way everything has been working fine and new listings are promoting as they should. Its been 2 days now and still fine. I think they had a PL update of some sort in April so maybe something got stuck. Hopefully, they fix it. eBay for Business asked for all the details on how I fixed it so they could pass it on to tech support.

Another thread in the Selling section of the community shows still more sellers are experiencing this issue.

Magazinesdepot wrote:

Is anyone else seeing on their seller dashboard that certain listings are not promoted and when try to promote them eBay error message says they are already promoted? Are they promoted or not?

This comment from user untensa is particularly concerning - sellers may incur additional unintended charges if they believe they do not have any active campaigns but eBay is still showing the listings as promoted.

I am seeing all of my listings are promoted at the max suggested rate, despite me not having any active campaign running. When clicking Edit in the Promoted Listing column in the Active Listings dash view, it say "Something went wrong please try again." When editing an active listing, I can confirm none of them are checked as actively promoted there, either. I'm going to contact eBay regarding this bug. If anyone else if experiencing this as well, please do report it asap.

eBay has been moving fast on backend changes lately - especially around promotions & advertising.

Harry Temkin announced the rollout of Automated Promoted Listings in April, allowing sellers to use rules based campaigns to "set it and forget it" as far as which items are promoted and what rates to use.

I've also seen sellers discussing seeing their own Promoted Listings showing within their eBay stores for the first time, with an indication it may be a test of some kind.

And more recently on the Q1 2021 earnings call last week, CEO Jamie Iannone indicated eBay is working to introduce new advertising opportunities.

Inspired by the success of Promoted Listings over the past few years, we are investing aggressively in innovation. We reached $1 billion of advertising revenue in 2020 primarily through Promoted Listings, which leverages a risk free CPA model for fixed price inventory. To capture our next billion, we are running multiple experiments, including an ad product for auctions and cost per click capabilities. We are also exploring a new capability that expand seller exposure by increasing off eBay traffic to Promoted Listings.

According to the April Seller Check-In, eBay is targeting expanding Promoted Listings to Auctions for "late May."

With eBay leaning very heavily on advertising for revenue growth, they cannot afford technical glitches and execution failures here. While it is important to move fast on their "tech led reimagination" it is even more important to move efficiently and test thoroughly to avoid service disruptions like reported above.