Webinar Transcript

Christian Garcia Rinkert: Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for joining today. Thank you to the Sellercloud team. We’re really excited to talk to you today about our partnership with Sellercloud and the Promoted Listings Standard tool, which is now available directly on the Sellercloud platform. So today we’ll cover why use eBay advertising, we’ll take a look at the Promoted Listings portfolio, we’ll deep dive into Promoted Listings Standard, which is now available in the Sellercloud platform, the available features to optimize campaign performance, some success stories, as well as a Sellercloud demo, and then we will wrap up with Q&A.

So as you all know, e-commerce has been growing at a record-setting pace and it will continue to do so. It’s estimated that by the end of the year, there will be $4.2 trillion in global e-commerce sales. And more specifically, looking at marketplaces like eBay, 88% of consumers begin their shopping journey on marketplaces. So today’s presentation will be focused on how you can maximize your presence on the eBay marketplace. We all have heard of eBay and many of us buy and sell on the platform. But it might surprise you to know about the scale and footprint that we have. We have just shy of $20 billion in gross GMV in Q3, 154 million active buyers globally, 19 million active sellers, and 1.5 billion live listings. We’re a Tech-led marketplace enabled by people and on a mission to drive economic empowerment.

Why Run eBay Ads?

With billions of listings across hundreds of categories making sure that your listings are visible and seen by our vibrant community can sometimes feel daunting. To help solve this challenge Promoted Listing Standard is eBay’s advertising solution that boosts listing visibility to help maximize exposure and ultimately increase the likelihood of sales. The promoted listings portfolio is comprised of three different flavors of campaign types. The suite of campaign types has been designed to address a diverse spectrum of customer needs. First, and the primary focus today is Promoted Listings Standard which is eBay’s long-running flagship advertising solution. Promoted Listing Standard is the low-risk simple to use cost per sale campaign type that boosts listing visibility in placements across the eBay network. Sellers select an ad rate or the final percentage of the sale price they’re willing to pay and off they go. And now better than ever, all of this is available via the Sellercloud platform. We also have recently launched Promoted Listings Advanced, which lets you promote your listings in the top slot or search via a cost-per-click model. We also have Promoted Listing Standard which boosts listing visibility of auction listings.

Benefits of Promoted Listing Standard

Deep diving into Promoted Listing Standard, we can really summarize the benefits into four key points.

1. Boost your listing visibility. With increased exposure across eBay, your inventory will reach more intent-driven shoppers throughout their customer journey.
2. Only pay when your item sells. You select the ad rate or the percentage of the final sales price that you’re willing to allocate to Promoted Listings Standard and off you go. With this mechanism, sellers directly control the ROAS, a cost model that you’re unlikely to find on other marketplaces.
3. Guidance and recommendations. We give you the guidance and recommendations to ensure that you’re successful. We’ll talk a little bit more about this and how it’s integrated into Sellercloud, but you have the tools and resources you need to maximize performance.
4. Integrated platform. All of this has been built and packaged within the Sellercloud platform. So you can manage all of your campaigns directly in the platform seamlessly without having to leave.

The popularity of the tool is clear. We have over 1 million sellers using Promoted Listings in Q2, 430 million listings were promoted and sellers see a double-digit lift in sales when using Promoted Listing Standard. In terms of where the placements are found, they’re primarily found in two different parts of the site, one within the search river. So user types in a search query and your Promoted Listing Standard will appear in search across a number of different slots. And here we have a unique methodology where we’re only promoting your listing if it were to give you a better boost in placement than they would organically. So no need to worry about any duplication between organic and your Promoted Listings standard. Promoted Listings Standard are also found across product pages. So when users click on an actual product, they’ll see a carousel of modules below the listing description, and that real estate on the site is 100%, dedicated to promoted listings. So by using the Promoted Listings Standard tool, you’ll have access to that real estate across the site, which can increase your exposure and visibility.

Key Areas of Guidance and Tools

Promoted Listing Standard placements are also found within the end of item page as well as sold item page. So again, just to summarize, you’re getting visibility across a number of different placements that you wouldn’t be getting if you’re just running organic listings. In terms of the key areas of guidance and tools that we give sellers, one is recommended listings. We have an algorithm that will determine which listings have the highest potential to benefit from the tool. This is built into the Sellercloud platform as well.

Then when it comes to suggested ad rate, which again, is the kind of bid proxy that sellers use, or the final percentage of the sales price that they’re willing to allocate to the tool, we help you there as well, by giving you item level suggested ad rates. And again, these are dynamic ad rates that vary between item attributes, seasonality, past performance, etc. So it can sometimes be challenging to know what ad rate you should be selecting to maximize performance, but we help you there with the suggested ad rate. In terms of best practices, there are really three key things that sellers should take in mind.

1. Improve visibility. By using the tools and categorizing your items correctly. So use the recommended listings guidance that we provide as well as the suggested ad rate to stay competitive.
2. Consider relevancy and pricing. Take into account all of the relevancy and pricing best practices.
3. Use reports for insights. The idea here is to garner insights and tweak your parameters accordingly. So selecting which ad rate to use which items to promote all of that can be done by leveraging the reports and different insights tools that eBay provides.

Lastly, and wrapping up here, sellers across a number of different categories see success with the tool. Here we have some heavy users of the tool across Electronics, Fashion and Apparel, and Home and Garden. The sellers see a triple-digit lift and overall sales, as well as a double-digit ROAS. So again, suggested ad rate and recommended listings are pieces of guidance that help sellers across a number of different verticals stay competitive. And here, we see that, again, sellers across a number of different verticals are seeing success in using the tool.

Because of the cost per sale model, ROAS is fully in your control. That’s a performance metric that you are able to fully control and dictate through the ad rate that you select. So that wraps up the eBay portion. I’m now going to hand it over to Sellercloud to walk you through a demo of how to get started in the tool.

Richard Bedford: Hi, everyone, I’m Rich, I work here at Sellerclouds. As you may know, Sellercloud is an e-commerce platform. We’re dedicated to helping you the online retailers be a lot of the challenges that are born in this new platform of using e-commerce to really run your entire business.

We’re working with eBay to allow you to streamline your business workflow. As Christian just went over, there are a lot of benefits to using this ad campaign feature on eBay. And up until now, you would have had to go to the eBay platform in order to create a marketing campaign like this. But because of the hard work of some of our developers here, we’ve actually brought ads into our platform so that you can manage all of your eBay Promoted Listings straight from your Sellercloud account without having to jump back and forth between the platforms.

Now we’re going to see a demonstration of how to use this feature within Sellercloud. You go to the Settings and go to the company where your eBay account is integrated. From that company, you would go and search eBay from the toolbox and drop down to Marketing campaigns. From here, you can add a new campaign. You choose eBay US, name your campaign and then you can select the date ranges that you want this ad campaign to drop. At the bottom here, you’ll add an ad rate, and then you’ll go ahead and add your products. From the product page, you can hit the plus sign, add any product that you want that you have listed on eBay and you can add that to this marketing campaign. Again, from that page, you have the option to change your ad rate. If you use your own ad rate, you just input whatever rate you want to use there. Or you can go to the three dots, it looks like a traffic light, simple, and you can get eBay’s recommended ad rate. So you would hit Get the ad rate and then you can use the ad rate and you’ll use eBay’s suggestion there. If you don’t know which ad rate to use, this can be a really useful feature because eBay has all the metrics. And they’ll suggest one tailored to your product that you’re trying to list. This is that Use suggested rate. And then you would go ahead and finish the process and it will list your ad campaign to your eBay account straight from your Sellercloud.

As you just saw there, it’s a very simple, straightforward process. The entire thing takes about a minute or two depending on how much time that you’re thinking about which products to add, and which ad rate to use. And then you go ahead, you list it and that is active on eBay as of the time that you click Submit on that marketing campaign.

Q&A Session

So now we’re gonna end up opening the floor. And we’ll take some questions, we have a panel here that will be fielding your questions, asking them to us and we’ll do our best to answer them for you. If you ask anything that we’re still working on or unsure about, we will get back to you. We will be available to you via email. So bring the questions.

Can this be done in the old Sellercloud Platform?
Yes, this is available on both the Alpha and the Delta platforms. For this webinar, I chose to record from the Delta platform, but it’s in the exact same location if you were to do it in Alpha. Great!

How do you know if ad rates are competitive?
The suggested ad rate that we provide is really kind of the best reference there. We again provide a kind of ballpark ad rate, tailored to your listings based on how competitive that listing is. It’s a dynamic algorithm that you’ll see vary by listing, and again, seasonality and different attributes like that. It’s a kind of staying within the suggested ad rate is a great indication of how competitive your ad rate is.

Can you list all your Sellercloud products through a marketing campaign?
Yes, as long as that product is enabled and active on eBay. If you have a product that is not active on eBay, you can’t create an eBay marketing campaign for that product.

Are there instructions for this on the old Sellercloud system?
Yes, you can reach out to your points of contact and they can walk you through it.

Is the ad attached to a Sellercloud SKU or an eBay listing ID?
When setting up the marketing campaign within Sellercloud, you set up the campaign, you name it, and you move on to where you add products to that campaign, you insert your Sellercloud SKU, which is linked to an eBay listing ID.

How do you select your ad rate per listing sold?
You select your ad rate per your Promoted Listing. If you have a $100 item, you select a 5% ad rate to promote that item; you would be charged $5 for that Promoted Listings Standard.

Additional Note

All campaigns must be strategically organized, and there’s no limit on the number of campaigns, but there is a limit to the number of listings that can be in a single campaign, which is 50,000.