eBay promoted listings
The ad rate comes straight out of your margin.
Promoted Listings are eBay's pay-for-placement program: you pick a percentage, and eBay charges it when a promoted item sells. This page describes the standard cost-per-sale kind — the one where no sale means no charge — which makes it feel free to try. It isn't free. It's a fee you set yourself, and most sellers set it without doing the one piece of arithmetic that matters.
How the cost actually works
You choose the ad rate per listing. When a promoted listing sells, that percentage is charged on top of the final value fee, the per-order fee, and everything else in the stack. eBay suggests rates per category and moves those suggestions around; the suggestion is not a price, it's a bid hint, and you can set your own number.
The part that catches people: the ad rate is charged on the same base as the final value fee — the total the buyer pays, meaning item plus shipping plus sales tax (the details are here) — not on the item price alone. A promoted sale carries both charges on that larger base, so your true all-in rate is higher than either number looks by itself. That's how our calculator computes it too.
When promotion is worth it
The decision is margin arithmetic. Every point of ad rate is a point of margin gone, so the question is never "does promotion get more views" — it usually does — but "does my margin have room for the rate I'm about to set, and does the extra sell-through pay for it".
The clean way to answer it: open the fee calculator, put in your sale with the promoted rate at zero, and read your margin. Then set the promoted rate to the number you're considering and watch what the margin does. If the promoted margin is still one you'd accept, promotion is a reasonable bet on velocity. If the promoted margin makes you wince, the listing can't afford the ad — at any level of extra traffic — because promotion multiplies sales, not margin.
Two honest cases where promotion tends to make sense: items you have in multiples, where faster velocity compounds, and items in crowded categories where page-one placement is the difference between selling and sitting. The case where it quietly loses money: thin-margin items promoted at the suggested rate because the suggestion box was pre-filled.
Run your own numbers
The calculator has a promoted-rate field for exactly this. Set it, and the ad cost shows up as its own line in the fee stack next to margin and ROI — so you can see what a rate does to a real sale before you commit to it.