Running promotions on eBay can be a great way to attract more customers, increase basket size, and set your listings apart from the competition. Navigating from the eBay Seller Hub, you’ll find an array of marketing and promotional tools to take your eBay business to the next level.
Putting together a thorough promotional plan for your eBay business can have a long-standing impact on your success and it is recommended to set aside a budget for running promotions and marketing exclusively on eBay to help drive platform specific objectives.
Marketplace Connect does not currently support built-in promotions management. You’ll need to manage some promotional campaigns from within eBay.
Promotions Manager
Promotions Manager is found within the “Marketing” tab in Seller Hub. Once launched, all promotions are automatically displayed on eBay to help drive traffic and conversions for your products.
- Order Discounts help increase your basket size and upsell customers who are about to complete a transaction by offering free or discounted products when buyers purchase multiple e.g. ‘Buy 2 get 1 free.’
- Codeless Vouchers allow you to offer an exclusive discount that is only available to recipients of your codeless voucher link. This is a great way to build customer loyalty and repeat purchases. You can follow up with buyers with a codeless voucher promotion.
- Sales Events + Markdown allows you to display discounts with visible strike-through pricing showing how much a buyer will save, directly on your listings.
With Marketplace Connect, you have the ability to automatically sync and display any website promotions you run, straight through to eBay. All that is necessary is to have Strike-Through-Pricing (STP) enabled on your eBay account. Please contact support if you’re interested in enabling this functionality.
For more information on Promotions Manager
Promoted listings
Promoted Listings is a paid advertising tool to help your items stand out across eBay. Promoted Listings allows you to create multiple campaigns based on various objectives, set an ad rate (% of item’s sale price), and boost your listings into 70+ highly visible placements on eBay, at the right time, in order to drive increased visibility and conversions.
With Promoted Listings, your campaigns run based on a cost-per-sale (CPA) format, meaning you’ll only pay the ad rate if a buyer clicks through your sponsored ad and purchases within 30 days.
Example campaign objectives:
- Clearance items
- Seasonal selling (Summer, Winter, Halloween, Christmas etc.)
- Best sellers
- New releases
- Always on visibility/awareness
The Promoted Listings campaign setup will also provide recommendations on items that are most likely to benefit from Promoted listings, based on eBay market trends.
Promoted Listings performance management
We recommend having Promoted Listings campaigns running at all times, reviewing and optimising regularly. Promoted Listings should be part of your ‘always-on’ marketing strategy on eBay.
Promoted Listings reporting gives you a view of the metrics that matter, so you can take control of your advertising strategy - Impressions, clicks, sold, ad fees, sales, CTR, sales conversion rate and average sold ad rate.
Eligibility: Promoted Listings is available to all sellers in good standing, with recent transaction history and multi-quantity inventory.
A major benefit of Promoted Listings is that your ads are only shown to buyers already in the process of shopping on eBay. Users on Facebook and Google are often doing something other than shopping, to engage your ad and make a purchase would require the buyer to stop what they’re doing. eBay Promoted Listings engages the buyer when they’re already searching for products like yours.
For more information on Promoted Listings.
Volume pricing
With Volume pricing, you can set up tiered discounts when buyers purchase multiple items while remaining in full control of the discounts you offer. The more your buyers purchase, the more they save.
Using highly visible badging in search results and tile-based pricing on the listing makes it much easier for buyers to take advantage of your volume pricing discounts. Encouraging buyers to load up their basket for a discount is great for your business and also helps save on shipping.
With Volume pricing, you can:
- Setup targeted campaigns using individual listings, specified product groups, categories, all inventory and create rules to automatically identify and import listings to your campaigns
- Choose to allow buyers to use the offer on unique products (products X + Y + Z) in the campaign or restrict the discounts to multiples of the same item (Product A + A + A).
- Select campaign timeframes (default is 3 years).
- Start, pause, edit or delete your campaigns at any time.
All fixed-price listings are eligible for Volume Pricing.
For more information on Volume Pricing.
IMPORTANT: Turn OFF Price synchronization from the Attribute Mapping page. Otherwise, Marketplace Connect will override the price changes made directly on eBay. This can be done by ticking the box on the Do Not Synchronize Price field.
Postage discounts
Offering free postage is recommended by Marketplace Connect, however, if you cannot do so, discounted postage also encourages buyers to shop with you and is a great way to incentivize buyers to add more items to their cart.
You can offer either Combined or Promotional Postage Discounts. You’ll save by posting items together, and buyers unlock discounted or free postage for orders over a certain amount.
- Promotional Postage rules allow you to offer free or discounted postage when buyers meet the eligibility criteria e.g. minimum order value or basket size.
- Combined postage discounts provide your buyers with discounted postage when purchasing multiple items, such as flat rate and discounted postage for each additional item
Sending and receiving offers
One of eBay’s older features is the ability to “watch” an item or ask the seller a question prior to committing to purchase. These instances are a great opportunity to re-engage your potential buyers after they’ve already indicated interest in your products - Accept Best Offers from buyers, send Offers to Buyers, or reply to a buyer query with an offer.
- Best offer: Adding a Best Offer option when adding listings allows buyers to submit a counter-offer for your product. When a buyer makes an offer, you can accept, decline, or make a counteroffer.
- Sending Offers to Buyers: With Offers to Buyers you can send offers to potential buyers that have already indicated interest in your items, helping you increase sales and drive buyer loyalty.
- Reply with Offer: If a buyer asks a question about a listing, you can send them an offer to buy the item at a lower price. Just go to My eBay > Messages and select Reply with Offer.
For more information on Sending and Receiving Offers.