In our last post we talked about the potential of getting great at promotions. You’re responsible for managing your own promotions in your physical store and your website presences, but there are other channels for you to consider for placing offers. As you might imagine, the giant multi channel marketplaces like Amazon and eBay are very well versed in the power to harness good deals. Daily Deals, Amazon and eBay Promotions Manager are all geared to help sellers move more products on each specific marketplace.
Amazon Promotions
Amazon Promotions, found on the Advertising tab, helps sellers create a range of promotions, including discounts, free shipping, free products, as well as external incentives like loyalty points. Sellers can also create claim codes that a buyer must enter when they place an order. Amazon displays your promotion on the product detail page only when your offer wins the all-important Amazon ‘Buy Box’. Amazon doesn’t guarantee that any particular seller’s listing will win the Buy Box.
Sellers are responsible for customising the terms and conditions for their Amazon promotions, along with any promotional messaging that appears on their product pages or at the checkout. The Detail Page display text that sellers create in Promotions displays on the product detail page only when the seller’s offer wins the Buy Box. Sellers have a number of options for messaging deals on the product detail page, namely no messaging, default messaging or customer messaging.
eBay Promotions
eBay is even more active in the promotions area and gives more control to sellers to drive sales this way. eBay’s Daily Deals program used to be offered to eBay’s managed accounts and has now been extended to all sellers so that they can co-ordinate their offers with the Daily Deals program.
According to eBay internal research from 2014, using eBay Promotions Manager to become great at promotions can almost double your gross merchandise volume. Promotions Manager is designed to help any eBay Shop subscriber make customised offers, attract new buyers and boost sales by giving them the opportunity to merchandise and cross-sell other products domestically, cross-border and via mobile.
In a study conducted by research group Forrester Research Inc., over 18% of online shoppers that noticed recommendations made additional purchases. eBay carried out a case study of one of their sellers over a ten-week period and found that with the eBay Promotions Manager the average basket size had jumped from 1.1 items to 1.94 items, or 1.76 times as many items, in other words close to doubling revenues. One of the main reasons why the tool is so successful is because in this highly visual medium the promotions receive prominent placement on the relevant pages. The tool itself supports many types of deals. These include Order Discounts for minimum thresholds, Sale Events where you nominate reduced or special price items to be merchandised on a ‘sale page’, and Accessory Discounts for cross-selling additional related items to the main item the buyer is looking for.
As with any other important initiative to grow sales, you should start experimenting with eBay Promotions Manager as early as you can. One of the most powerful ways to use this tool is to make your best selling items boost the low-selling items in your ‘long tail’.
Firstly, analyse your sales performance and short-list your best selling items. Then, look at your inventory and identify low selling SKUs which have a decent margin and which you can price competitively. Then you can pair up best sellers with long tail sellers by creating an accessory discount offer. Your long tail items are then promoted on your best seller listings.
Every single item on eBay has a Cassini Best Match score. A key component of this score is the conversion or sell-through rate. Some of your SKUs will never have sold anything, or perhaps never even had an impression. If a customer finds your item via an offer and makes a purchase, you’ve technically made a sale without an impression – thus giving your item an artificially high conversion rate and raising your rankings for that item.
Read our next post on how we helped customers get great at promotions.
