How Do Markdowns Work on eBay Stores?

We’ll be exploring how the markdown manager for stores works in future blog posts, but here are a few key points:

1. The ability to do “sale” offers such as percent off or dollar amount off of items where those discounts show on the eBay screen as a promotion is limited to sellers with eBay “Store” accounts. Free users of eBay are not offered this option.
2. Listings being promoted can be picked by any of the following ways:
   • Selection by Store Category
   • Selection by Price
   • Search by any of the main listing fields
   • Individual (manual) addition to the promotion list
3. Multiple sales promotions can be run at once via the Markdown Manager.
4. Promotions can also feature discounted or free shipping.
5. The minimum time for a sale is 24 hours.
6. All promotions are scheduled around Pacific Time (eBay time).

In my eBay store, Styles on the Sly, you I’ve created a number of promotions and they are visible at the header of my store as shown below.

Clicking the “On Sale” link will show all items currently discounted.

Note: these items each have a custom listing frame that also shows a quick link to these markdowns. For example, this Ann Taylor LOFT blouse on eBay shows up as follows:

There are many benefits in designing sales with certain discounted amounts. In this case, by choosing the 12% discount, eBay has placed a green ribbon showing I’m offering 10-15% off of Women’s Clothing. This is a helpful way to imply you are selling for less than you are. It is important that you are giving a fair deal and a good discount, but it doesn’t hurt that the entire set of items has 15% showing as a top range. When combined with the Make Offer option for fixed price listings, customers can be positive you are giving them a bargain. As I’ve mentioned on my eBay About Me page, I’m already getting referrals and return shoppers. This is the way to make the most money.

Below that part of the listing, we see this:

Further highlighting the promotion and even giving links to other products I’m selling along with a link to see more that aren’t pictured! eBay is doing much of the work for you here and it is certainly easier than setting up your own eCommerce platform, even though in that case you aren’t sharing 10% of your revenue with eBay.

Going below this area, we see the actual custom listing frame:

Here we see that the listing itself contains links to my About Me custom page and my two most popular categories (Men’s Clothing and Women’s Clothing) plus a link from eBay highlighting Items On Sale. Again, clicking this will give us all items on sale, not just the discounts in women’s clothing or whatever particular discount in which this blouse is included.

So, the moral of this story is that eBay will help you promote the heck out of your products if you choose good categories and have multiple sales running at one time.

I’d love some feedback from you experienced sellers on the following:

1. Do you see significant sales improvements with your on sale items?
2. How long do you run your sales for?
3. Are your items “truly on sale” or marked up a little before so you can offer a bigger promotion?

Anonymous comments are welcomed if you don’t want to share with a name that can be tied back to your store.

I’ll answer first, but I hope others will chime in -

1. Yes. So far, every time I’ve done a markdown, I’ve had a couple of transactions that I wouldn’t have gotten (or hadn’t gotten yet for something listed quite a while).
2. I do 24 hours although I have 4 promotions going right now that are 48 your offers.
3. I never mark up items for promotional discounts, but I do mark up items on occasion. This should be a future topic for the blog, but sometimes items won’t sell for $11.99 but then I raise the price to $19.99 or best offer and someone offers $17 (which I happily take). I don’t know the psychology of the shoppers in these cases, but it does work.

Please comment and feel free to suggest topics you want covered first. In the next week we’ll look at listing an item manually (using the eBay website) vs using a program such as iSale or GarageSale (two mac and iOS apps).

Thanks for reading! Remember, if you see something in my shop you like, simply make an offer and let me know you read about my shop from this blog post and you’ll get at least 10% on anything that doesn’t include free shipping. For repeat customers or people looking to buy more than one item at a time, we can even drop the prices better!