eBay offers several product promotion options:
- Strike-through price promotion.
- Quantity discounts where buying one product reduces the price of another
- Electronic discount coupons. This means customers can buy a specific product at a lower price using a code received from the seller. Useful when we want to reward customer loyalty, for example.
In this article, I’ll describe how to create an eBay promotion: strike-through price promotion.
This is a very interesting tool because it makes your listing stand out in search results and gives customers the opportunity to buy items at a lower price without any conditions.
Products that can be added to this form of promotion must not have had their price edited in the last 14 days.
To open such a campaign (like any other mentioned in this article), go to Seller Hub, select the Marketing tab and click Promotions. You’ll be taken to the promotion creation page, where on the right side there’s a Create Promotion button. Click this button and select Sale event + markdown from the menu:
Now a page will appear where you need to choose whether the price will be reduced by percentage (1) or by amount (2), and whether shipping should be free (3). Of course, if shipping for the products to be added is already free, nothing will change when selecting option 3. The minimum markdown value is 5% or if you choose the amount option, it’s 5 Euros.
After selecting the desired markdown form, we’re taken to the next page.
We choose how to add products to the promotion. The first is based on manual selection of listings, the second on selected categories.
I’ll focus on the first method.
After clicking select items, a page will appear where you can select specific products for promotion.
The page has useful filters that make it easier to select products for promotion:
- You can select a category: eBay category or store category – this will reduce the product list and make it easier to find the desired product.
- You can search for products by words contained in their titles.
- You can filter products based on their prices.
- This option allows you to hide products that are already in another campaign.
You can add up to 500 products to one campaign.
Select the products you’re interested in under Items found and click Confirm selection.
The next stage shows a summary of selected products. You can make any corrections, like removing a product, or go back to the previous stage and add more. Then click Save and review. This is the final stage of launching the promotion.
At this stage, the page contains two large boxes. The first is Review your sale event
Here we define additional promotion parameters:
- Sale event name (1)- campaign name visible to the seller
- Discount type and items (2): information about discount amount and selected products
- Include skipped items when they qualify (3)- if at the time of creating the promotion a product cannot be added, e.g., due to a price change in the last 14 days, checking this option will automatically add the product when it starts meeting the conditions, i.e., when 14 days pass since the price change.
- Keep items in this sale and block price increases (4)- this is simply a promotional price lock, meaning it cannot be manually changed until the end of the campaign
- Date range (5)- here we set the promotion start and end dates. The promotion can last maximum 14 days, minimum 1 day. By clicking on the start time, you can select the Start now option, meaning the campaign will start immediately. You may need to edit the end time by a few hours to not exceed 14 days – you’ll be notified about this with an appropriate alert.
- Show retail calendar (6) – this is a calendar marking important events for sellers in a given country, including sports events and holidays, which can help choose promotion dates depending on the merchandise being sold.
The second box on this page, Sale event banner, concerns how the customer sees the campaign.
Here we have:
- Sale event description – campaign name that the customer sees after clicking on Show More
The promotion name can be edited during the campaign.
- Sale event image – here you can add graphics to the campaign banner
- Preview sale event banner – campaign banner using the graphics added in Sale event image
When we’ve added a banner for our promotional campaign, or decided to launch the campaign without a banner, we click the blue Launch button:
The promotion has been created.
Creating quantity discounts works very similarly. I’ll describe this in more detail in the next article.
