eBay are launching an additional item to the Daily and Weekly Deal emails in the form of an exclusive offer for email subscribers.
The RAC are the first brand to advertise a deal and are offering instead of their normal £144.50. If you’re subscribed to Daily Deal emails then you should start seeing the new offers from today.
eBay say that the emails offer an “exciting opportunity to connect with an engaged audience of purchase-ready consumers who are actively looking for special deals and offers in a relevant context across various sectors”.
The way that the offers have been constructed is that the email links directly to the on eBay, and clicking a link from there takes you to a landing page on the RAC website. Once on the RAC website you can sign up online for the discounted service or telephone the RAC to join up quoting an eBay discount code.
The racmotoringservices eBay User ID was only set up this year and had no feedback to date so looks as though it was set up purely to facilitate this deal. One wonders why user’s can’t click directly from the eBay Daily Deal email to the offer on the RAC website, but I guess it confirms to the user that the offer is promoted by eBay.
It will be interesting to see what other deals are offered to eBay users in this manner. The transaction doesn’t take place on eBay and in this case isn’t a service that would normally be sold on the site so isn’t taking business away from other sellers.
If eBay can build a reputation for great deals at the best online prices then that has to be good for the overall brand image, but if they start diverting buyers to off-eBay deals that could be fulfilled by an eBay seller I’d expect there to be more than a few complaints.
10 Responses
Interesting move.
However the saving here is actually just £24 when compared with the RAC online price for the same 3 options.
Still a saving nonetheless but the headline is a tad delusory.
Get any of these badly wrong and the companies involved, including eBay, will get severely bitten.
An exclusive Royal Mail offer for email subscribers would be handy. Say pay £100 for £200 worth of vouchers that could be used at post offices when you buy stamps.
Or how about for £59.99 eBay offering £100 vouchers that could be used to pay eBay fees?
Cash up front for eBay. Good for cashflow. Can’t be bad!
Or a buy 100 listings up front get 50 free type of deal?
On the Deals page I see a link to subscribe to Daily Deal alerts, if you click subscribe it just signs you out of eBay. Am I on the wrong page?
I just don’t understand ebay’s thinking at all!
Why allow a zero feedback seller to put off-site links on an about me page so as to secure sales not on ebay? I can see that there is some ebay revenue here, but it’s short-termism to seek to gain it this way. It’s exactly what ebay shouldn’t be doing if it wants to bring big businesses to the site as done with outlets, and to keep them trading on the site in the long term.
I was told years ago that there was a 24 hour delay built into joining RAC. This was to stop the bloke who had broken down(and was not a Member) and been told by a Garage what it was going to cost to rescue him to just sign up for RAC Membership and immediately call to be rescued(and long before the paperwork had gone through the system). I wonder if the same delay is built into signing up via ebay?