Promoted Listings put your item higher in search and on eBay's pages, and they are charged in two ways. Which one you use decides what you pay and when.
General: you pay when it sells
With Promoted Listings General (cost per sale) you choose an ad rate. Nothing is charged for showing the ad; you pay when the promoted item sells and an ad for it was clicked in the 30 days before. eBay's page says the click can be from any buyer, not only the one who bought — so a sale can be charged the ad fee even though that buyer found the item another way.
The ad rate is a percentage of the total sale amount: item price, postage, taxes and other applicable fees. It is not a percentage of your profit, and it is on top of the final value fee. At a 5% rate a $43.19 sale pays $2.16.
Priority: you pay per click
With Promoted Listings Priority (cost per click) you pay for every valid click, whether or not anything sells. Sales are counted when the buyer buys the item they clicked, and also when the same buyer buys any other item from you after clicking — eBay calls those halo sales.
Does the ad pay for itself?
Work it out per order, not per campaign. In our example the sale makes $17.42 without the ad and $15.26 with it — the ad cost $2.16 of a $17.42 profit, 12.4% of it. An ad is worth it when it brings sales you would not otherwise have made, at a profit; if most of the sales it is charged on would have happened anyway, it is a discount you are giving eBay.
- Know the item's margin before choosing a rate. A 10% ad rate on an item with a 12% margin leaves almost nothing.
- Watch ad fees per product. The ad fee is booked as its own line, often a day after the sale, so totals hide which products it is eating into.
- Check refunds. On a buyer-initiated full refund eBay credits the General ad fee, and a partial refund credits a proportional share; eBay's fee-credit table does not list it for refunds of damaged or not-as-described items — see refunds and fee credits.
Open the eBay profit calculator Free, no sign-up — US and UK fees.
Baiord puts every ad fee on the order it was charged for, even when eBay books it later, so each order and each product shows its profit after ads. How Baiord reads eBay's fees.
eBay's own pages
The rates and rules in this guide were checked against these on 30 October 2026. eBay changes its fees from time to time; its pages are the final word.