eBay takes on Amazon Prime Day 2018 with 20% discounts on 20 retailers

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It’s not surprising to note that today, Amazon Prime Day 2018, is also seeing a bit of a bonanza for eBay. They’ve announced a slew of deals and discounts on ebay.co.uk from a variety of brands that you might want to check out. The PLAY20 event (that’s the coupon code you need for the selected retailers) offers a 20% discount on 20 retailers and you can find the landing page with more details here.

Among the names involved, among others, are; AO, Google UK, Superdry, Simplybe , Boohoo, Littlewoods-clearance and Samsung UK.

It started at 10am this morning (yes, a full two hours before Prime deals start to fizz) and will continue until midnight on Thursday. There’s a minimum spend of £20 and a maximum discount of £100. And beware, make sure you browse properly and fill your basket, because the coupon code can only be used the once.

Of course, this is no bad thing. With the World Cup and Wimbledon over, the school holidays already underway or on the horizon, and the weather starting (perhaps) to change, it’s a good chance to get shopping and ecommerce to the front of mind of consumers again. And, whilst Amazon might be setting the pace and naming the date, that doesn’t mean that merchants can’t and won’t benefit from a general “halo affect” as the various publicity machines bring people online and they start shopping.

That said, from a merchant perspective, it is a little irksome that there isn’t a way for small merchants to get involved with this promotion on eBay in the same way that Amazon sellers can with Prime Day. But there have been several sitewide price promotions and coupon events recently that have included all eBay merchants.

Don’t forget to stay in touch over the next few days as the online summer discount feeding frenzy develops and let us know whether eBay’s efforts or Amazon Prime Day 2018 have a positive influence of your sales.

7 Responses

  1. Great thinking from ebay, currently running a 20% offer for anything over £50 yet no one knows about it as ebay are testing the banners at the bottom of the page and not applying the discount till checkout. Yet the big companies come along and they are happy to promote their sales.

  2. Yes Rob, I am starting thinking the real reason they’re hiding offers made by us little guys, is so they can make a big deal of the offers by the big guys.

    The official reason, that buyers are getting some sort of ‘sale fatigue’ but only from the offers that some sellers run, stinks of BS.

    Fact is, these offers – like 20% off when you spend £50 – are BETTER than the likes of Argos can generally offer on a day to day basis (not counting stock that they’re trying to get rid of hard and fast) Ebay wants the home page to have the wow factor and best offers. But if we’re making better offers, that can be seen as undermining their impact.

  3. Can just imagine the algorithm that ebay set for it now.
    One seller selling item for £100 and offering 20% off. Another seller selling at £80 and offering £5 off.
    Yet the 20% gets all the attention as they are offering a better discount even thou the other is a better price but no knows this as the discount is hidden.

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