eBay have announced three major changes to checkout today, two are postage discount based but the most important change is “Biddy’s Button“, or as eBay have called it “Enhanced Merchandising”.
Biddy’s Button
At last after two years campaigning eBay have at last realised that it’s rather a good idea to encourage buyers to carry on buying in a shoppingcartesque manner. Pushing them to pay without links back to a sellers shop and other products is criminal, buying as many items as possible, as easily as possible, is exactly what any seller wants their buyers to do. eBay making this easier is fantastic and my one and only complaint is why didn’t they do it years ago?
Discount Differentiation
One of the reasons I’ve never been able to sensibly apply global combined postage discounts is the huge variations in costs. This evening I’ve sold a printer (approx 25kg) and a SODIMM memory card (approx 0.025kg). Trying to work out shipping discounts to combine is impossible, but now you’ll be able to select different postage discounts for different products to take account of weights and use of diverse carriers.
Up-Sell Incentivised Shipping
A new postage discount innovation for eBay, and one that tally’s more with Biddy’s Button (I must start calling it Enhanced Merchandising!). Rather than giving a postage discount based on a per item discount you can apply critera based discounts. For example if your average order value is £40 you can offer a “Free postage if you spend over £50” discount. What a great way to encourage buyers to purchase more! Another method will be “Buy any three items and pay only £5 postage”.
It’s great to see eBay making radical changes to the checkout flow which should not only increase multiple sales but also provide sellers with more ammunition to market upselling discounts to their customers. Hopefully the changes once fully rolled out will fix (and are the explanation for!) the huge checkout problems from the last month.
All in all, these three innovations should be good news for sellers…. so long as they work! 😉
