Sending offers to watchers experiment (with numbers!) Month #1

[mickdog]

Background: I’m a smallish store (800 listings) and a part-time seller. I’ve been dabbling with the send offer to watchers for a while and I finally started tracking it in July. My results are below. I will keep doing this for at least until the end of the year so I have a good idea of what is really going on with this newish feature.

What I do: Everyone does things differently with offers but here are my parameters. When eBay gives me the send offers to watchers each day I send out offers if the item is over 2 weeks old (so no new items at all, I sort by date and look for new items to exclude). I then use the bulk send offers option at a price of 20.1%. I do this amount because it gives weird numbers (16.78 or 33.47) that let me know immediately it isn’t my original price (I almost always start listings at xx.99 or xxx.00). And over 20% seems like a substantial enough of a discount to get people looking.

Results in July: I sent out 127 offers. I had to stop on the 25th because I was going out of town a few days later and didn’t want pending sales without my extended handling time. So that is about 5 offers a day average. Of those 127 offers, I sold 7 items (actually 8, one cancelled the sale so we won’t count that). That is 5.5% of those offers resulted in a completed sale, or another way to look at it, about one in 18 resulted in a sale. That was better than I thought (1 out of 25-30 was my guess).

Those 7 sales generated $116 extra dollars (original price was approx $142 on those items). This means there was only a $16.57 average sale price. My average sale price for the whole month of July was $32.36 (including these 7). So these 7 sales were some of my lowest sales of the month.

I sold $1456 in July, so these extra sales were about 8% of total sales, a good but not amazing bump. It probably took me 2-3 minutes a day to do this with the bulk send offer tool. So this $116 probably took me 50-75 minutes of work. So the hourly rate is fine.

It’ll be interesting to see if these numbers are typical or not for me as the months go on. I’d love to hear if others have been keeping track and what their results are.

[Mark S]

mickdog,

My limited experiment showed that sending an offer on items $35 and under gave a better conversion rate than those items priced over $35. Not real scientific because of my limited scope, but see if that corresponds to your findings in the future.

Mark

[mickdog]

Yep, I had one big offer accepted in June ($89 offer on an originally $115 collectible) but that was it and that was before I started my experiment officially. Most others are in the $40 and under category with many in the $20 and under section.

[Mark S]

Ok, so our experiments seem to find the same conclusion: people want offers in the $40 and under – preferably under $20.

I guess that makes sense. It is a no brainer to spend less than $20 on something you need\want and are getting 20% off. Those high priced items probably make people think a lot more about spending that much money.

Mark

[mickdog]

Ok, second month in the books, I think this will be the last update because the months are similar and the data is sufficient for me.

Protocol: I send offers out on items that are more than 2 weeks old and I give an offer of between 15-20%.

Recap

July: 127 offers sent, 7 accepted and paid. Original Price: $142 Sold Price: $116 Avg Price $16.57

New Month

Aug: 244 offers sent, 11 accepted and paid. Original Price: $213 Sold Price: $177.50 Avg Price $16.14

Two Month Avg
July/Aug 371 offers, 18 accepted and paid. Original Price $355 Sold Price: $293.50 Avg price $16.31

So on average for every 21 offers sent I get one sale but that sale is on a low value item (~$16 as opposed to my normal avg sale of +$30). Still for minimal work (less than 5 min a day) the extra 8% sales bump and $150 extra for the month is probably worth it.

[Jay]

I dont have numbers, but this seems about right. We sell mainly low dollar items every so often when we send out offers. Usually items that we’re glad to sell.

[HistoryNerd]

This is very consistent with what I’m finding. I haven’t kept track closely, but I think I’m in the ballpark of 1 out of 20 offers to buyers accepted. All have been under $25 and most have even been $15 or less. It occasionally helps me move out old, low-dollar items, so I keep doing it.

[Old Dad]

I haven’t kept close records. I did have 1 over $100 sale from Send Offer, but most were less expensive sales. I going to guess less than 5% results and that seems to be declining. What we can’t know is how many of those items would have sold anyway at full price. I think I’m just going to stop spending time doing this unless eBay can give me ways to filter the offers.

[Author]

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