A link to Markdown Manager has now appeared in Manage Your Shop on the UK site. Rolled out in the US last month (yes, they got the good stuff first again), this is a very handy way of creating time-limited sales in your eBay shop, without having to go through editing each individual listing.
Sellers can run sales for particular categories, individual items or all their SIF listings, at discounts between 5% and 75%. The original price and the new discounted price are then both shown on the listing. It would be nice if BINs could be included too, but one feature I particularly like is the ability to start a sale some time in the future: what a great addition to your email marketing to give your best customers advance warning of a sale starting later today!
4 Responses
I feel MarkDown Manager may have legal implications for some sellers!
I fear the ‘law’ that a sale item must have been on sale (at the higher price) for atleast 7 days within the preceeding 28 days of the commencement of the sale will be ingnored, thus providing false ‘bargains’
When this was introduced on .com a short while ago, I asked some top sellers in a group I am part of, if they had similar legislation, noooooooooooooooo was the general reply – initialy, but on research by them, – yesssssssssss- came the reply back, many States had similar legislation, which they were unaware of, as they were etailers and not originally b and m retailers, so thus unaware such legislation even existed.
It will be intersting to see if and how the current UK legislation regarding Sales price is applied to auctions where MarkDown Manager is used incorrectly.
I think you needn’t have worried about this one, Eddie – you can’t use MM on items that have been on sale for less than 28 days.
I can confirm that. MM does seem to be effectively automatically screening for SIF listings which have not been online long enough to qualify for inclusion in a sale.
It’ll be interesting to see how many sellers mistakenly interpret this automatic screening and non-inclusion as a glitch.
I think many sellers are going to think this is a glitch – the message eBay give that xx listings can’t be included is not at all clear. Plus MM is full of glitches anyway – I reduced the prices on 200 items the other day, and email marketing could only find seven of them!