eBay Opens Custom Promoted Stores Ads To All Sellers, Adds Influencer & Live Landing Pages
eBay is finally making Promoted Stores Custom available to all eligible sellers, expanding its cost per click Store ad offering with more control over which listings are used in campaigns and where buyers are sent when they click.
The company announced the wider rollout September 29, saying all eligible sellers with an active eBay Store subscription can now choose Custom when creating a Promoted Stores campaign through the Advertising tab in Seller Hub.
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With a custom campaign, you can:
Choose the inventory you want to highlight: Select up to 1,000 listings for your campaign and choose up to ten featured listings to display in your ads.
Choose where buyers land: Direct buyers to a custom eBay landing page that best fits your campaign, such as a Store page, sales event, or curated collection.
Build campaigns around key moments: Highlight seasonal inventory, new arrivals, priority products, promotions, and more.
Promoted Stores Custom was first announced in January, when eBay said the new option would allow sellers to select up to 1,000 listings, including ten featured items, and choose custom landing pages such as sales events, curated collections, influencer-led pages and eBay Live events.
Liz Morton
Previously much of the campaign creation for Promoted Stores was automatically handled by eBay, with sellers largely limited to Store category pages or active coupons and unable to select exactly which items they wanted to feature.
But despite the January announcement telling sellers they could “now” use Promoted Stores Custom, the new features were not actually available to most sellers at the time and eBay later confirmed access was limited while the company continued testing.
The campaign setup also provides a clearer picture of just how much flexibility that custom landing page option offers. eBay says the URL must begin with https:// and point to a page on the eBay site, and testing confirms regular Store pages and sale event pages work as expected, along with eBay Live event links and influencer pages.
When eBay first described “influencer-led pages” as an eligible destination in January, it wasn't entirely clear what exactly that meant. Presumably it included curated pages influencers can create, but there was also the possibility it could apply more broadly to storefront-style pages being built out as part of the Ambassador affiliate program.
Testing now confirms Ambassador pages using eBay's /inf/ influencer URL structure are accepted as custom landing pages. eBay's official Fashion partner storefront provides an example of influencer page structure:
eBay introduced the Ambassador program last year, offering affiliates the opportunity to earn up to 7.5% commission on eligible sales, while killing off the eBay Partner Network Seller Incentive which had previously allowed sellers to essentially sell their own items fee-free if the purchase came through an affiliate link.
Finding a way to enable cost per click ads that these influencers can be enticed to use to direct onsite traffic to their Ambassador storefronts is a clever move on eBay's part, but will savvy affiliates be willing to pay for ads that eat into their overall earnings?
eBay has also been pushing aggressively to grow Live this year after years of relatively slow expansion, while sellers have increasingly flocked to competitors like Whatnot, Poshmark and TikTok Shop. Promoted Stores Custom gives participating sellers a way to put advertising dollars behind individual Live events, adding another paid visibility option as eBay tries to scale the livestream shopping business.
The campaign setup tells sellers to choose listings they want “to use for targeting in this campaign,” but specifically says those selections will not impact which listings are displayed on the custom landing page. The listings selected for targeting do not have to match what a buyer ultimately sees after clicking the ad, allowing sellers to use one set of inventory for targeting while directing traffic to a broader sale event, Store page or upcoming Live show.
Promoted Stores Custom still uses eBay's cost per click monthly budget pacing system introduced last year, where the target daily budget is not a hard spending limit. eBay can spend as much as twice that target on individual days while averaging costs over the applicable monthly period, a policy that has caught some sellers by surprise when campaigns charged significantly more than they believed they had set as their daily maximum.
