The holiday shopping season may be over for most retailers, but the shopping season for automotive sellers is just a few months away. While some businesses are prepping for their fiscal year and reviewing competition metrics, auto retailers are strategizing ways to stay ahead of their competition. Fortunately for automotive sellers, marketplace advertising tools are becoming more available and acceptable in all categories. With competition tightening in the e-commerce industry, particularly for automotive sellers on eBay, adoption of useful marketing tactics is vital to stay ahead of competitors. So how can auto sellers maintain a higher listing visibility? The answer: Use promoted listings for fitment.

Listing on marketplaces isn’t that difficult, but adding fitment to the mix makes the process complex. Two years ago promoted listings were introduced into the e-commerce market and many companies, brands and retailers benefited from these positive eBay changes that allowed sellers to increase merchandise exposure on a cost-per-sell ad model for all categories — except automotive. But in October 2017, eBay announced its Promoted Listings program to eBay Motors categories that require year/make/model fitment! This means automotive sellers now have a level playing field with all the other categories and can maximize product visibility just before the peak season begins (usually at the beginning of February).

By using promoted listings, automotive sellers have a chance to be at the top of search results, allowing a listing to show up as the fourth or fifth listing on the search results. Another attribute to using these ads is having premium placements on the item page above and below the item description. This product visibility can be placed on other listing tools such as My eBay, ended item, product review pages, etc. Ads will be pulled based on the relevance of items to the buyer’s search keywords and the chosen ad rate. Sellers can also start, stop or make changes to their campaigns at any time.

Now that you are aware of the beneficial factors of promoted listings, how do you know when to use them? This tool would be useful when your items are seasonal, when they don’t get enough visibility in search or when there is an excess of inventory items. You have the ability to get rid of discounted items and can stimulate items with higher selling prices that otherwise don’t move easily.  

For best practices, consider the following:

• Create campaign names based on inventory in each campaign (category, brand, quantity or price).
• Construct evergreen campaigns with no end dates for inventory that is always on hand.
• Use trending rates to improve the chances of your ads being displayed more often.

Stand above the crowd in competitive categories and boost your 2018 goals by taking a few minutes to check out this video that we created with eBay on eBay Promotions Manager as well as eBay promoted listings. Good luck — and promote your listings!