Following the announcement that Amazon Prime Day will run for 36 hours from mid day on the 16th to 17th of July, eBay CEO Devin Wenig tweeted that eBay will also be holding a deals week. Not only that, but Devin announced that the next wave of eBay’s brand and marketing campaign will also go live.
@eBay will hold large deals events on the week of July 16 to showcase our significant inventory and price advantages. Expect the next wave of our brand and marketing campaign to launch as well.
— Devin Wenig (@devinwenig) July 3, 2018
So what can we expect from eBay in the face of Amazon’s massive 1,000,000 product deals extravaganza? Here at Tamebay we think we know what the thrust of the campaign will be and the message is that eBay have just as good a deal as anywhere else on the Internet (including Amazon). To prepare, eBay have just introduced a Best Price Guarantee in the US offering 110% of the difference back if a customer finds a lower price on a competitor site. We’re expecting that eBay will be heavily promoting the eBay Best Price Guarantee to coincide with Amazon Prime Day.
When eBay announced the Best Price Guarantee, they were very clear that there would be no blackouts on price matching throughout the summer. They went so far as to say it’s busy season for deals and they want customers to have the confidence to know they will get the best possible price on eBay.
“Summer is a busy, deal-driven time for shopping and Best Price Guarantee gives eBay customers the confidence to navigate the season knowing they are getting the best possible price. Customers can enjoy the best prices every day, with no blackouts on price-matching throughout the summer.”
– Scott Cutler, eBay’s Senior Vice President, Americas
We’ll be waiting with interest to see if eBay do indeed launch their Best Price Guarantee marketing to coincide with Prime Day, but all the smart money says that it will.
Items qualifying for the eBay.com Best Price Guarantee
Items that qualify for the eBay Best Price Guarantee are:
- Any product that displays the Best Price Guarantee badge, including the Top 20 best selling products across thousands of categories as well any item in our eBay Deals program.
- Eligible items must be available from an approved competitor, including Amazon.com, BestBuy.com, HomeDepot.com, Jet.com, Sears.com, Target.com, Walmart.com, and Wayfair.com.
- Both items (listed on eBay and the approved competitor’s website) should be exactly the same and currently in stock.
eBay UK Price Match Guarantee
eBay UK have a similar promise, but it’s a Price Match Guarantee… that is equalling the competitor price, not the best price by 10%. eBay UK match prices for new, unopened items on the eBay Deals page against available and in stock products on Amazon, Currys, Argos, Asda, John Lewis, or Tesco.
2 Responses
So this works using technology such as webscraping to confirm the item qualifies for he “best price guarantee” badge.
Ebay’s site has so many bugs and faults already that are not fixed, but they are wasting resources to setup price checking technology, which still does not always mean that ebay’s offer will actually be better, it could be the same price as Amazon and qualify, but the offer on Amazon could be prime, and on ebay Royal Mail 48, completely different offering.
Great if they can drive traffic, but feel they should prioritise fixing all the day to day problems with the site first, not just the recent stuff, basic stuff like combined shipping across different listings for international buyers, still does not work well after years and years. Properly unifying the accounts would be nice too, and too many other bugs to bother to list.
You need good foundations first, please ebay just focus on fixing the broken website first.