How is Self-Service Advertising different from Sponsored Listings?

Both Sponsored Listings and the Self-Service Advertising platform can help build your business and increase sales. There are many compelling reasons to use these tools. Sponsored listings are great if you want to advertise a select number of listings. The Self Service Advertising platform is great if you want to advertise all of your listings or subsets of your listings.

Sponsored Listings are ads that display on the home page and/or search pages that display your listings. A Sponsored Listing costs $4 per item and is listed for the duration of your auction or until your item sell whichever comes firsts. It targets by exact match and is displayed randomly with a random number of impressions. When your Sponsored Listings sell you have to pay for your new listing to be sponsored.

The Self-Service Advertising platform also displays ads in premium locations, but with SSA you can target categories, keywords, similar products, complementary products and you can sell across categories. Additionally, ads run based on impressions served and you can advertise all of your listings or different subsets of your listings for a little as $50 for 20,000 impressions. With the Self-Service Advertising platform new listings are automatically included and will run as long as impressions are available.

The following chart describes the differences between Sponsored Listings and the Self Service Advertising platform.

Sponsored ListingsSelf-Service Advertising
Targeting ad location by categoryNoYes
Reporting  NoYes
Best to promote Multiple listingsNoYes
Best to Promote Single ListingsYesNo
Cost structurePay Per listingPay Per # impressions
Cost comparison for 15 listings$60 for 15 listings$50 for 20,000 Impressions

For example, if you have 15 items and wanted to run Sponsored Listings for all of them it would cost $60. If you chose the Self-Service Advertising platform you pay for impressions and could spend as little as $50 to advertise all your listings and receive 20,000 impressions.


Advertising is a proven way to increase sales. Whether you have decided to advertise a few items with Sponsored Listings or many items with the Self Service Advertising platform, you have made an excellent decision.