eBay offers sellers some pretty good listing features and promotions that can and do help to boost the price at which items eventually sell at auction. The prices of such promotional features vary widely, however, as do the results that they produce—and the return doesn't always justify the investment.
As an example, though it's possible to have any auction listing featured on the eBay home page for a hefty listing surcharge, everyone can agree that even promotion of that quality can't turn a $50 cell phone into a $500 windfall. What might be less obvious but is still no less true is that smaller promotions are similarly only helpful under narrow circumstances.
Promotions can only help your item to realize its already existing potential value as an eBay sale. They can't help an item to appreciate or sell for a price that exceeds market value—so don't blindly or impulsively add promotional features to an auction listing with the vague idea that they will improve your final sale price.
What To Do Instead
When you're selecting optional features for your listing—especially promotional features that are intended only to draw more bidders in—use this rule of thumb to guide you in evaluating cost:The feature's dollar cost translates roughly to the maximum percentage of return you should expect to see under ideal circumstances.
For example, you should expect a listing feature that costs $5.00 to generate at most on the order of a 5 percent—or single digit—return for you versus what your item might otherwise have sold for. You can expect a listing feature that costs $20.00 to generate at most on the order of 20 percent as a return.
With this calculation in mind, you can see that it makes no sense to add a $20.00 promotional feature to a $20.00 item. To add a $20.00 feature to a $100.00 item would be at best moot. But if you're selling a $600.00 item, that $20.00 feature might provide a good return for you, if the listing nicely done and market conditions are favorable.
Of course, the ideal case is not always reached, so in many cases you won't see even this much return. And there are caveats and complications to this already very rough rule, the foremost among them being the quantity of goods in the marketplace. The rule doesn't apply to goods that are extremely rare on eBay, or to goods for which there is a very large surplus. Both are cases in which you'll probably want to avoid most of the flashier promotional features. More to the point, you should ensure that your auction listing isn't suffering from other weaknesses, such as poor feedback or drab and boring content before you consider promoting it at a surcharge.
As a rule of thumb, however, this rule shows you the most you can expect in return for purchasing a promotion and why you should think hard before buying big-value promotions for merely medium-value items.
