Case study · eBay
eBay case study: sales up 449% in 12 months
A small eBay store, selling under 30 items a month with no ads. We took over the store and its catalog: listings, Promoted Listings, pricing and offers, and account health. Every number comes from eBay Seller Hub. The store name is hidden to protect our client.
eBay store
$23,074.06 sales in 12 months
- Total sales+449.2%
- Items sold+419.6%
- Net sales+349.0%
- Average price per item+5.7%
Oct 2024 – Sep 2025 Oct 2025 – Sep 2026
+449%
total sales: $23,074.06 in 12 months
3.63x
return on ad spend from Promoted Listings, over the full year
0.84%
return rate, with an Above Standard seller level
The starting point
A store that had stopped growing
- About $4.2K in sales a year
- Under 30 items sold a month
- No ads, and no plan for eBay’s promotion tools
- Titles, item specifics and photos that didn’t do well in eBay search
- Volume pricing, multi-buy discounts and offers to buyers hardly used
- A seller level that needed steady care
Our role
Full eBay store and catalog management
- Promoted Listings: setup, rates and scaling what works
- Listing copy, title SEO and item specifics
- Multi-buy pricing and promotional discounts
- Buyer messages, Resolution Center cases and account health
- Tracking, competitor checks and regular reports
What we did
Four jobs, run together by one team
Promoted Listings
- Launched campaigns across the catalog
- Set ad rates against category averages, to protect the margin
- Tracked clicks, ad fees, ROAS and cost per click
Listings & search
- Rewrote titles with the words buyers search for, within eBay’s 80-character limit
- Filled in all the key item specifics, so items show up in filtered searches
- Improved the main photos to get more clicks
Pricing & offers
- Volume pricing, such as buy 2 and save 10%, to raise order value
- Free and fast shipping options
- Daily offers to interested buyers and watchers
Orders & account health
- Daily checks that orders shipped on time
- Buyer questions and Resolution Center cases handled early
- Defect and return rates kept well below eBay’s limits
Results
12 months, compared with the year before
From the eBay Seller Hub sales report: October 1, 2025 – September 30, 2026, compared with October 1, 2024 – September 30, 2025.
| Oct 2024 – Sep 2025 | Oct 2025 – Sep 2026 | Change | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total sales (with taxes) | about $4.2K | $23,074.06 | +449.2% |
| Items sold | 336 | 1,746 | +419.6% |
| Net sales (after taxes and selling costs) | about $1.2K | $5,376.66 | +349.0% |
| Average price per item | about $12.50 | $13.22 | +5.7% |
The earlier numbers are worked out from the change eBay shows, so they are rounded.
- Sales grew about 5.5 times
- 1,410 more items sold than the year before
- The average price per item went up 5.7%, so more sales didn’t mean lower prices
Promoted Listings
A 3.63x return on ad spend, over a full year
From eBay’s campaign dashboard, October 1, 2025 – September 30, 2026. The year before, the store ran no ads.
$19,742.87
sales from ads
$5,432.99
ad fees
3.63x
return on ad spend (ROAS)
27.5%
ad fees ÷ ad sales (ACoS)
- 1,462 items sold through ads, from 26,043 clicks
- 5.61% of ad clicks turned into a sale
- $0.26 average cost per click
Account health
Above Standard, with a 0.84% return rate
eBay rates every seller each month, based on things like defects, late shipments and cases.
- Past seller level (September 20, 2026): Above Standard
- Current seller level (October 20, 2026): Above Standard
- If eBay checked today (next check November 20, 2026): Above Standard
- Return rate: 0.84%, just 12 returns out of 1,437 transactions
About these numbers
- All numbers come from eBay Seller Hub screenshots.
- Sales and ad numbers both cover October 1, 2025 – September 30, 2026.
- Total sales include taxes. Net sales are after taxes and selling costs, including shipping.
- Ad sales are eBay’s own Promoted Listings figure. They overlap with total sales and are not profit.
- Many things worked together, so no single action caused all of the growth.
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