Advertising on GGSel: bids, places and payback
SelyaGGSel advertising is a dollar bid for a place in a category, for tomorrow only, placed blind. Choose by past days: they are on the ad bids page (in Russian).
GGSel has no free raising like FunPay. To stand higher in a category, you pay for the place. The rules of this advertising are unusual, and if you do not know them in advance it is easy to pay for an empty day.
How a bid works
- You pay for a place in a category. Advertised products stand above the rest in the category, and among themselves by the size of the bid.
- In dollars and from the balance. The bid is charged from the seller's GGSel balance in dollars. The minimum in our purchases is $0.40, the step is 1 cent.
- For tomorrow and later only. You cannot buy a place for today: bids for a day close at midnight Moscow time.
- Up only. A bid can be raised but not lowered. The extra amount is added to what has already been paid.
Bids are sealed
Until the day starts, you see only your own bid for it. Other people's bids for tomorrow are not visible — until midnight nobody knows which place they will get. After midnight the bids for today are fixed, and you can see who paid how much.
So a bid is chosen from history: what the first, third and fifth places in this category cost on past days.
History — only 11 days
Bids of past days are visible in the seller account, but GGSel keeps them for only 11 days. They cannot be obtained through the API. If you do not record the history every day, after two weeks there will be no data to tell what paid off. We collect it daily from the first day of advertising.
When advertising pays off
Work out two numbers: what a place costs per day and how much you earn per day from sales of that product. If advertising brings in less than it costs, it works at a loss however many sales it gives.
- Profit, not revenue. Compare the bid with the profit after GGSel's fee and your cost, not with the product's price.
- The category's demand. First place in a category that sells one piece a day will not make ten. Look at how many sales the category has overall.
- The exchange rate. The bid is in dollars and the profit in rubles. Recalculate at the rate of the day of purchase.
- The price on the showcase. Advertising brings a buyer to the product, but they buy from whoever is cheaper. If your price is clearly above your neighbors', a place will not help.
Hence simple arithmetic: a $0.40 place in a category with live demand is easy to pay back, while first place in a popular category where dozens of sellers fight for it easily eats all the profit on the product. Start with inexpensive places and compare sales with days without advertising.
How not to lose money
- Do not bid on a product your supplier may not have tomorrow: the place is paid for and there is nothing to sell.
- Check that the product is active and passed moderation. Advertising a product taken off sale is money thrown away.
- Do not trust automation with buying bids without a ceiling on the amount. A bid is money from the balance, and it can be raised but not returned.