Back in the Autumn (when you only needed two layers instead of 20), eBay announced a change to its Promotions Manager tool but what is the Promotions Manager and how can you best utilise it? Don’t sweat it (in your 20 layers); we’re here to explain.
eBay’s Promotions Manager
The Promotions Manager is an eBay tool that helps eCommerce businesses to increase sales, spending and customers through offers, incentives and promotions.
Who Can Use the eBay Promotions Manager?
Anyone with an eBay store can use the Promotions Manager, for free. Just head into the Seller Hub and click on the ‘marketing’ tab – once you’re there you can access the Promotions Manager and include any items that are fixed price and offer PayPal as one of the payment options.
Why Use The Promotions Manager?
The Promotions Manager not only enables sellers to create promotions, it also highlights them on the eBay search-results page and product page – increasing your exposure. It also allows you to:
Schedule promotions, according to “retail moments“, up to six months in advance
Time promotions so that they only last for a specified amount of time
Show markdowns with a strike-through price
Include/exclude items
Create a dedicated offer page for you to showcase through email and social media.
Why Use Promotions?
Promotions can help to excel your eCommerce business:
1. Buyers expect deals. Black Friday, Cyber Monday, voucher codes, sales, bank holiday deals – today 75% of shoppers look for some kind of deal and 42% want free/discounted shipping;
2. eBay testing data shows an 11% increase in sales in the first few months of running promotions;
3. You stand out in search results and additional items forming part of the same promotion will appear on each product page – Increasing your exposure;
4. Promotions increase cart size and transaction amount. We’ve all been there – you go out for a 60p chocolate bar and return £1.20 lighter and three bars of chocolate heavier; and
5. You can ‘bundle’ items and run cross-product promotions, increasing the likelihood of buyers purchasing more from you.
What Promotions Can you Run?
eBay offers four categories of promotions:
1. Order Discounts – BOGOF, £10 off when you spend £50, 10% off etc.
2. Shipping Discountsrder Discounts – Free shipping when you spend over £30, free next day delivery when you spent over £100 etc.
3. Coupon Codes – Unique discount URLs.
4. Sales Events – E.g. 50% all gloves.
These are all well-known strategies to make customers feel they’re getting a bargain and you to increase sales and customer loyalty.
Handling the Promotions
Before running any kind of promotion, you must be confident that you can handle an increase in orders and customers. Multichannel management software, such as Expandly, helps you do just that through:
Order Management – View, process, track and download all of your orders from a central location, as well as creating and batch printing packing slips, pick lists and invoices, whilst simultaneously updating the data on each of your sales platforms.
Inventory Management – Live inventory syncs your stock across all of your sales channel(s), preventing over-selling and allowing you to manage your stock levels and fulfil customer expectations (saving your brand and reputation in the process). No more ring-fencing.
Shipping – Integrating directly with shipping carriers, allowing you to batch print shipping labels, invoices and other paperwork, whilst sending this information directly to your sales channel(s).
Did It Do It For You?
It’s important to understand which promotiosn worked and which promotions didn’t. You can do this by keeping track of:
Average cart size
Average transaction value
Sales lift (promotional sales divided by total sales)
Attach rate (transactions using the promotion vs eligible promotion transaction
Luckily Expandly offers easy reporting functions, meaning that you can easily create this data, whilst also linking it directly to your accounting software.
Happy Sales!