You ended your Promoted Offsite campaign. The fees kept coming.
What eBay documents, what sellers actually measured, and the path that really stops the charges.
Promoted Offsite is the eBay ad product that puts your listings on external channels — Google and similar —
rather than inside eBay search. It is a cost-per-click product, not cost-per-sale, and that single difference is
why it behaves in ways that surprise people who are used to Promoted Listings General.
This page collects what eBay itself documents about it, what sellers have measured in public threads, and the
steps that actually end the charges — including the one option most sellers have never seen.
1. What eBay says Promoted Offsite is
From eBay's own Promoted Offsite help page:
"Promoted Offsite is a cost-per-click (CPC) advertising tool. It uses a dynamic cost-per-click model and
automatically adjusts for each listing on a daily basis… If you end a campaign early, your daily spend might be up
to twice your daily budget. This is because the campaign may not have had the chance to average out the budget over
time."
— eBay Promoted Offsite help page (eBay Seller Centre documentation)
Three things follow directly from that wording, and they matter more than they sound:
You pay for clicks, not sales. A click that never converts still costs you money.
The per-click price is not fixed. It is dynamic, adjusted daily, and depends on what eBay's external
partners charge — eBay describes CPC as a blend of partner cost, historical click averages and a service fee.
Ending a campaign early is explicitly not a clean stop. eBay documents that the final day can cost up to
double your daily budget.
2. What sellers measured
The complaint is not "offsite ads are expensive". It is "the number I see is not the number I budgeted, and it
does not stop when I stop it".
"My promoted offsite sales in these 2 weeks was $893.23, my fees for that was $166.99. My listings already have a
small percentage of the 'promoted listing' add to them as well… The additional fees comes to 18.6% on top of my
12.7% fees + 2% promoted listing fees, so that comes to 33.3% seller fees on my sales… I sold these $893.23
worth of my merchandise without making a dime in profit."
— eBay community seller with 20 years and 50,000+ items sold, Promoted Offsite Results for an experienced seller
A second seller, in a different thread, found the same shape of problem only after the fact — because the offsite
report is not somewhere most people look weekly:
"The worst offender was a security camera, it sold for $92. The Promoted Offsite advertising fees for that single
listing… $46.05. $1.54 cost per click. That's an ACOS of 50%! … Needless to say I ended the campaign
upon realizing how badly it wasted money."
— eBay seller on Reddit, r/eBaySellers
Sourcing honesty
Both quotes above are individual sellers reporting their own accounts, not eBay data and not an average. They are
included because they are specific, named, and checkable — not because they represent what you will be charged.
Your CPC depends on category, channel and competition.
3. Ending the campaign is not ending the charges
This is the part that costs people real money, so here is exactly what each source says rather than one merged
number:
Source
What it says happens after you end a campaign
eBay help page
Daily spend on the final day can be up to 2× your daily budget, because the budget did not get to average out.
eBay community mentor answer
"The promotion won't end immediately. It may take up to 30 days before any 'clicks' stop registering for the promotion fees if the item sells after changes are made."
eBay community seller, relaying support
Told offsite ads "could run anywhere from 15–30 days after 'cancelling' or 'ending' them", and advised that ending and relisting was the only way to clear it immediately.
Chinese-language trade press
Reported sellers saying charges continued up to 72 hours after closing a store promotion campaign.
Those numbers disagree (72 hours vs 15–30 days), and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What all four agree
on is the part that matters: the day you press "end" is not the day the billing stops.
The same community mentor notes the trade-off on the only immediate fix — end the listing and relist it without
a promotion — which clears the promotion right away but "you risk losing watchers or other data and stats". For a
seller with 2,000+ promoted listings, that is not a realistic option, which is why the thread exists at all.
4. How to end or change a campaign (the actual path)
End or edit a campaign
Open the Advertising dashboard in Seller Hub (ebay.com/sh/ads/dashboard).
Scroll to Campaign overview — every active campaign and what it applies to is listed there.
Click the campaign name (it is a link) to open its detail page and see the listings inside it.
Use Edit campaign (top right) to change the rate or end the promotion.
Then keep checking for another billing cycle — per the sources above, clicks can keep registering after
the end date.
Or edit from the listings side
Seller Hub → Listings → Active → Promoted Listings, then edit the promoted listing there.
The option most sellers have never seen: per-campaign exclusions
eBay added an exclude listings option for rule-based General campaigns. You can check individual items in a
campaign and click "Exclude listings", or bulk-paste item IDs separated by commas or rows. Reported limits: up to
10,000 listings per campaign, settings apply only to that campaign, and there is no account-level
exclusion rule — so a store-wide "never promote these" is still not possible.
Practically, this is how you keep a broad campaign running while protecting the thin-margin, clearance and
already-ranking-well items that should never have been in it.
5. How to check what offsite actually cost you
Pull the transaction report. Seller Hub → Payments → Reports → transaction report (CSV). Each fee is its
own row with amount and charge date.
Sort by the date charged, not the date sold. Rows dated after your campaign end date are the ones people
miss.
Compare against the offsite campaign's own reporting in the advertising dashboard, so you can see clicks
and cost separately from sales.
Compute ACOS per listing, not per campaign. Campaign-level averages hide exactly the $46.05-on-$92 case
above.
One more thing to distrust
Seller press has reported that ad-dashboard figures themselves are unreliable right now: eBay's own info pop-up for
some General campaigns currently defines impressions as "the number of times your ads have appeared offsite" — which
is wrong for General campaigns and appears to be text meant for Offsite. The same reporting notes that changes to the
attribution policy have made the dashboard's ROAS figure close to useless for General campaigns. Check numbers
against the transaction report rather than trusting the dashboard alone.
6. What to do with all this
Treat offsite as a separate experiment with its own budget, not as an extension of Promoted Listings
General. It is CPC; the risk profile is different.
Exclude your thin-margin and clearance items before you launch, not after. Retrospective exclusion does
not refund clicks already charged.
Set an end date you can afford to overrun, and re-check the transaction report for one full cycle after
it.
Do not end-and-relist 2,000 items to escape a 30-day tail. The watchers and view history you destroy
usually cost more than the tail.
We are considering building a small tool for this — one that reads your own eBay transaction report and
shows, per order, which sales carried an ad fee, how much, and which charges landed after you had already ended the
campaign. Nothing is built yet, and we are not asking you to believe it works.
If you have been billed after ending a campaign, tell us. Leave your email and you will get one message
when there is something to test — nothing else.
Email only, used once. No eBay login, no account access, nothing automated against your account.