If you’ve been accustomed to using eBayMarkDown Manager, then you should be aware that the tool has been moved and is now part of eBay’s new Promotions Manager.
Title your promotions to promote Black Friday offers
With Black Friday fast approaching, did you know that you could tag your eBay Markdown promotions with a Sale Event Banner which is visible to buyers? It would make sense over the sales period to use this to display specific Black Friday and Cyber Monday messaging to attract buyers.
How to create an eBay Markdown sales event
To create an eBay Markdown sales event, simply log into eBay Promotion Manager, click create a promotion and select ‘Sale event + markdown’. You can then choose to set a promotion for a specific set of individually selected set of up to 500 products or for up to 10,000 listings in a single promotion set rules by category or via filters to include products in the sale. It’s also possible to set multiple discounts so don’t think that all products have to have the same percentage knocked off – tailor promotions according to the margins you wish to retain.
If you previously had sales events set up in eBay MarkDown Manager then these will continue to run until they expire, but all new campaigns which you create will now be managed in eBay Promotion Manager which is available to all sellers who have an active eBay Shop subscription. Watch the video to learn more:
17 Responses
hi, i sent in an email to Tamebay yesterday advising that the new markdown manager does not work at all
Forgot to add that ebay are still looking into the issues as a matter of urgency (according to ebay concierge).
James – I use sixbit to list my items.
Laura – try putting on 3 new sail events one after the other. On the third occasion (maybe the 4th) you will be taken to the old markdown manager where you will be able to put a sale on.
Hi James,
No, not using any third party listing software
I list on eBay.com USA and have just been forced off Markdown Manager. Yes, MM was a bit clunky and it was a hassle to move items between sales, but it worked well at what it was designed to do.
Promotions manager as a replacement to Markdown Manager is a major step backwards.
I can’t populate a sale with the contents of a previous sale like I used to do with MM. That makes it very hard to restart a sale when the previous one is about to end. I had to develop an offline tool to work around this major feature shortfall.
I don’t seem able to add an item to a sale once it is started (but I can remove one – why the difference?). Instead I am forced to start a whole new promo if I create a listing and want it to show initially with a discount. So I’m going to have a hundred promos by the end of each month that then need to be consolidated when I restart the cycle next month. Also it takes MUCH longer for the sale price to kick in. So people who track new listings in real time (like me) will see the pre-sale price in their feed and never see the discounted price.
Markdown manager regarded all sales as a single promo for the purposes of populating the promo box that eBay (annoyingly) puts above the description box forcing the description below the “fold” (further compounding the problem of people not reading the description?). Under MM it would pick the most appropriate cross sells from the whole population of items with sale pricing. Now it seems to limit the choice to items within the same promo as the item being viewed which is a problem with the proliferation of one-item promotions mentioned above.
I’ve generally been OK with seller hub as I don’t use it much but I’m starting to have sympathy with the folks complaining that it’s creating more problems that it solves.
I think eBay is well-intentioned but they just don’t seem to have any clue what it’s like to run a business on their platform. Hal recognized that and championed the ‘eat your own dog food’ program but I guess that’s no longer going to be a priority.
They really need some seller advocacy folks recruited from the ranks of full time sellers who are responsible for reviewing proposed developments and providing helpful feedback to the product managers on what the implications of their ideas would be in production rather than forcing half-baked ideas upon the long suffering seller.
Markdown manager works good on ebay.com, but still not working correctly on ebay.co.uk. I tried many times in different days but still failed. The error message says:
On sale The item was successfully discounted.
Removed The item was successfully reset to its original price.
Pending The item is waiting to be discounted, or the item is waiting to be reset to its original price.
Removing You have flagged this item for removal from the sale and it will be reset to its original price.
SKIPPED: Already discounted We can’t discount items that are already marked down.
SKIPPED: Maximum Your markdown didn’t meet the maximum discount. See help for details.
SKIPPED: Minimum Your markdown didn’t meet the minimum discount. See help for details.
SKIPPED: Minimum price Your discount puts your item price below eBay’s minimum listing price for this site.
SKIPPED: Not discounted We can’t reset the price because the item wasn’t in the Markdown sale.
SKIPPED: Price We can’t discount items that are too new or have changed price recently. See help for details.
Agree with the above posts: the “new” markdown manager DOES NOT WORK !!!
Try it for yourself: select any number of items and it will either edit none of them or a tiny handful at best, with gobbledegook excuses as to why the vast majority aren’t eligble.
And for the last few days there have been hundreds of error reports in the auto relist log like these:
Internal error to the application
The requested data is currently not available due to an eBay system error. Please try again later.
System temporarily unavailable, please try listing again
This item can’t be accessed because the listing has been deleted, is a Half.com listing, or you aren’t the seller
It’s also impossible to list items due to pictures not uploading as Ebay is “not a secure site”.
It’s complete and utter shambles again.
Does Rob Hattrell even know or care about all this crap that sellers have to put up with?
Never mind the PR shtick, there are flames coming out from under the bonnet, Mr Hattrell.
I ran a promotion the first day the new promotion manager was launched. ok, only a small amount of promotions – I was really just testing it. Anyway it worked fine. Are you guys doing it right?
We can’t get anything to work much on eBay anymore. Called for some help with markdown manager I was promised a call back 2 weeks ago.
We are giving up as of now and moving stock to amazon.
eBay is a mess and they only value high turnover businesses that make eBay money but not money themselves as they mark down prices so low there is no profit.
Sales are down 16% this month everyone is panicking on the forums. Thing is eBay ran a huge promotion last year offering customer discounts. They have not repeated it this year so of course sales are down, but many sellers are panicking trying to work out why the drop in sales.
Glad we don’t rely on eBay for our income