Preparing for Peak Trade: Offers
With Black Friday next week, it’s time to gear up your strategy to boost your sales on eBay during the busiest shopping time of the year. Over the past of couple months, we have discussed ways to help prepare your store for Peak Trade season including inventory, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), eBay advertising and shipping. Take a look back for useful tips on how to not only avoid peak trade panic, but thrive during this time. Keep reading to discover how offers on eBay can help boost conversions.
Everybody likes a bargain, more so than ever with the current financial crisis. According to a survey conducted by KPMG, 32% of consumers plan to cut back on their household spending this year. By offering deals on your products, you not only benefit the buyers, you will be more appealing to purchase from compared to your competitors.
First things first: Strategise
Start planning early to ensure your listings are set up for success. Sales on eBay can be scheduled for up to 6 months in advance, so start strategising possible stock options for offers.
Have a look at competitors to see what they have on offer. You can use the eBay Competitor Performance Dashboard to see what’s working for them and be prepared to be flexible in your pricing strategy in case they’re beating you in price. You might need to update your prices throughout peak trade season to be more competitive.
Offer free or discounted shipping – according to data from Optiseller, only 18.77% of listings on eBay UK offer shipping discounts. Stand out from the crowd by offering either a discount on shipping or be a part of the 80% of listings that offer free shipping!
eBay Offers
What better way to ramp up your eBay traffic than to offer discounts on your products. According to eBay, approximately 44% of listings transactions featured at least one of their promo tools (source).
Did you know?
If buyers have viewed or are watching your listings, you can actually send a private reduced offer to them. Bear in mind, if your item £200 or less, the offer must be at least 5% off.
Another great way to seal the deal quickly is to reply to a buyer’s question with an offer. Watchers of items are at least 30% more likely to buy when they received a private message offer (source).
When it comes to choosing items in your inventory that could be discounted, a good place to start might be your items that have not sold in the past 30 days. Use Optiseller’s Unsold Items Report to choose listings that could be potential discounted sales items. Then use one of eBay’s many promotion options. In this series, we’ll focus on three main avenues:
- Best Offer
- Sale Event + Markdown
- Order Discounts
Best Offer
eBay has what’s called “Best Offer.” This option invites buyers to negotiate with the seller. You can add Best Offer to your Buy it Now or Auction listings. Choose to accept, decline or counteroffer when a buyer makes an offer. This is a great way to boost sales quickly and provides a chance for you to test your pricing strategy. According to eBay, sellers see a difference to their visibility and overall sales by using the Best Offer option.
Sale Event + Markdown
Another great option from eBay is to create a sale event + markdown. Use this to group relevant inventory together and creating a before and after price on your listings. To avoid a more complicated shopping experience for customers, only run targeted campaigns for specific categories, as opposed to the whole shop.
Hot tip 🔥
According to eBay, buyers respond better to a percentage off over a fixed amount off (source).
It is worth mentioning that listings do need to have been originally listed for at least two weeks prior to the sale event and can only be listed for a maximum of two weeks at the sale price. After which, they can be re-added as a discounted item after a further two weeks.
Order Discount
The third option highlighted in today’s peak trade series is order discounts. Order discounts are where you encourage buyers to increase their order by offering reduced prices depending on the quantity they buy or the amount they spend. There are two options to choose from: quantity discount (example: buy two get a third free) and threshold discount (example: spend £50 and get 10% off).
Shout about it!
No matter what avenue you go down, make sure to shout about it! Use your social media channels, email marketing, eBay and website store front. Your offers will be shown in the Special Offers page, as well as the general page for all your promotions, so encourage your buyers to visit these places first to get the biggest bang for their buck. Offers are a great way to boost visibility and sales on eBay and there’s no better time than during Peak Trade season.
English
