Home › Forums › Buying and Selling › Selling on eBay › Running a large sale on Ebay long-tail items test; does it result in more sales?
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07/18/2018 at 11:37 am #45723
Alright, here are the results of the sale that I ran on Ebay this past weekend. I timed it to coincide with Amazon Prime day. I actually started it a day early in order to get money that people had set aside for Prime. I ran a 20% off sale. It is the highest sale I have had in my store since last Thanksgiving. When I run sales, they are normally for 5-15% off.
Here are the numbers, for the stats fans:
Out of 9,300 items, Ebay put the following number on sale for this sale: 5821
From the 15th to the 17th, the following number of items sold overall: 18
From the 15th to the 17th, the following number of items ON SALE sold: 9
Out of the 9 sold, the following number of items were listed for 1.5-2+ years: 5
Out of the 9 sold, 1 was listed in the past month, and 1 item was listed for over 5 years.
18 is on the low-end for the amount of sales I get on a weekend. The sale might have helped pushed through 2 or 3 sales, such as the 1 item that was listed for more than 5 years, and the most expensive item I sold during the sale. I think the sale really only contributed to 2-3 additional items being sold than would have normally been sold over the course of a normal summer weekend.
The most expensive item that was sold during the sale was a book for $115. It was originally listed for $145, and would have sold no matter what at that price if I had not run a sale. It had been listed for less than a month and cost a quarter, so I’m not too worried about selling it for less.
When I last ran a 20% off sale, it was during one of the busiest times of the year for ebay. It worked and sparked a lot of orders. However, would I have gotten the same amount of orders anyway because it was around the Christmas buying season? I don’t know.
All I know is that this sale did not result in a large increase in orders. Running sales on long-tail items do not instantly sell the items. You still have to wait for the right buyer to come along.
I might try this again in a few weeks at 25% off to see if it is any different outside of the Prime Day mess. Maybe everyone really spent all of their money during that sale? I don’t know. It is worth repeating to see if there’s anything that can help budge long-tail items at a faster clip other than patience.
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07/18/2018 at 11:43 am #45724
This has been our experience. Just lowering price on long tail items do not spur sales. We usually end up selling items for cheaper that would of probably been bought at full price. But at a sale gives us the illusion we have power over sales.
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07/18/2018 at 1:09 pm #45733
I did this experiment at 40% off. Not a single sale from that experiment.
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07/18/2018 at 1:36 pm #45739
Yep, sales on unique items may not work. If there is a small number of potential buyers, the sale probably isn’t a motivating factor.
We have run sales periodically, and we usually get a bit of a boost in sales, but it isn’t huge. Like all things that are discussed (sales, promoted listings, free shipping, free returns, EGD, etc.), no one item is going to give a huge boost in sales. If it did, everyone would do it all the time.
Each item may run 2%-5% increase in sales if THAT item was a factor in buying decisions to most buyers. If the item is unique, price may not be a consideration (provided your pricing is solid), so sales or promoted listings may not help.
Wal-Mart doesn’t advertise and run promotions like the BMW dealership does…
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07/18/2018 at 2:01 pm #45745
Yeah, I am actually seeing a small boost in sales today. I’ve already sold 4 items. Most of my orders for Ebay come in during the evening or overnight, so this is very encouraging. Sales have been way down in my store over the past 6 weeks due to glitches or who knows, so anything that can kick start sales back to normal is great.
When I say sales are way down compared to normal, they are way down compared to normal comparing my store on a year-by-year basis. Sales are down by 1/3rd this year from the past several years. I could see being down a 1/4 this year, but they are way lower than they should be. This is one of the high-points of the year for a few lines of stock I carry that I have been actively restocking with good material over the past few weeks, and it is still just crickets this year. Foreign sales? Economy? Glitches? Disinterest? idk.
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07/18/2018 at 2:09 pm #45749
almasty: Can you break down the items that “should” be moving faster, and see if there is a slowdown overall for those items? Looking at the total number offered vs the total sales (which is past 90 days, so dividing those sales by 1/3 would be one month of sales, then you can divide that by the available inventory to get a monthly STR?)
I’m just wondering if you can see what the market for these items looks like. For example, I know that one of my lines is down YOY, but I can also see that it is due to a glut in the market for them too. So, I am selling less, but the market is bigger, so I’m getting a smaller slice of the pie. So I’m having to decide whether to hold out or to cut price and get a higher STR at a lower ASP. These are more commodity items, so price is a bigger factor than probably for you.
But you may be able to do some market research on your slow items to see if there are too many, or others are selling at lower price, or very little (so maybe a lower interest), things like that.
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07/18/2018 at 3:49 pm #45771
The way I used to determine that was to go to:
then find each sub-category within that I focus on.
Now, when I try to look up items that way, all the stores come up as 0 results.
I tried the new way to look up how items are selling via Growth – Sourcing Guidance, but it doesn’t break down items low enough to see specific results. I also tried to search for these specific categories, but it won’t come up outside of the ones they suggest.
The old way I used to search resulted in showing the top stores in the category for each subsection. I was always in the top 5 for the ones that I did well in. Now, I can’t determine where I am. ๐
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07/18/2018 at 4:56 pm #45779
almasty: Got me stumped.
Can you add some titles, brand types, anything in search results similar to yours and see others that are out there?
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