The Guardian reports that eBay UK will be pushing harder than ever in the run up to Christmas. As well as the current billboard campaign, adverts will appear in glossy women’s magazines including Vogue, OK!, Grazia, Look and Elle.
Angus McCarey, director of eBay Enterprise, said “The Fashion Outlet is our fastest growing sales channel.” Fashion sales have grown 25% in the last year. Since launch in May, sales through Fashion Outlet have generated around £4m revenue for the brands sellling through the site.
eBay’s publicity remains relentlessly about the brands. Angus again: “We know that consumers are increasingly looking for a range of high-quality high street goods at low prices, and eBay’s Fashion Outlet provides them with the ability to purchase goods from the brands they love.”
Is there any good news for smaller sellers in all this? It’s to be hoped that there is a knock-on effect from promoting eBay as a destination site for fashion shoppers. The bizarrely unusable does feature items from non-outlet sellers. With 4.6 million buyers purchasing fashion items from eBay UK in the three months from May this year, at least some of them must end up in the shops of underpromoted smaller sellers. Mustn’t they?
6 Responses
£4 million in over 4 months, is that all! If there really are 4.6 million buyers, that’s about 80p each.
That’s seller turnover. What’s ebay’s take, maybe 5% (perhaps less) plus the paypal fees, let’s say 7% overall.
Has 280k even covered their costs?
That’s abysmal, far worse than I’d imagined.
Yes, but the 4.6m is fashion buyers, so the 80p is the share captured by fashion outlet.
Sorry to be horribly argumentative, but we know that £4m was spent by fashion buyers on outlet, from a possible pool of 4.6m people. Of course it was not 4.6m people spending 80p each, but a smaller (unknown) number spending a larger (also unknown) amount each.
No, you are right, it’s a briliant result, ebay will have spent nothing like £280k in set up, marketing and advertising costs.