Warning: My eBay listing fees ate up 40% of my profit last month

I was sitting in my living room going over my Shopify numbers and noticed something felt off. Turns out I had 12 items sitting in eBay's promoted listings with a 15% ad rate and I forgot to turn them off after they sold. Lost about $240 in fees on a $600 profit month. Has anyone else had automated settings quietly drain their margins?

2 comments

2 Comments

knight.diana4d ago

The autopilot settings on eBay are sneaky" really sums it up. They design those promoted listing defaults to be sticky by design, so you have to deliberately go and turn them off rather than them expiring naturally. I've started setting a monthly calendar reminder to audit all my active ad campaigns just to catch those leftover fees before they add up.

hannaht294d ago

Wait, you had promoted listings running at 15% and just forgot about them? That's brutal, I've been there too. I once had a set of vintage cameras sitting in a promoted campaign for three weeks after they sold, cost me like $80 before I caught it. The autopilot settings on eBay are sneaky, they really will just keep eating into your profit unless you manually kill them.