A new feature for buyers and sellers has reportedly been launched by eBay. They’re billing it as ‘volume price offers’. It’s system that allows merchants to offer discounts on multiple purchases. The more units bought, the lower the price per unit.
As they say of the new feature:
Volume price discounts, give tiered discounts to buyers purchasing multiple quantities of your items. The improved item page treatment makes it easier for buyers to buy in bulk, so you save on shipping.
– eBay
It’s a common tactic used in retail. One widget may be £3, but buy two and they will be £2.90 each, 3 will be £2.75 each and so on. It’s particularly well suited to lower price or commodity goods where people will likely need more than one over time. You can see from the screenshot that comes from the relevant help page what it will look like when used.
Sadly, as it stands, one limitation of the new feature is it isn’t available on multi-variation listings, according to an eBay rep on the eBay.com discussion boards. So that means that you’ll need to apply the discounts to individual lines on an item by item basis. Judging by the hep page above which explains how you do it, that looks like a reasonably involved process involving CSV files. For time pressed eBay merchants, it does represent yet another thing that needs to be dealt with. But hopefully should just be a one-off activity.
As far as we can see at the moment it’s only available on eBay.com, and even then it doesn’t appear to have been officially announced. But it seems most likely that it will be applied to international eBay sites in due course, as is often the way.
What do you think of this new feature? If it’s available to you, do you think you’ll make use of it?
5 Responses
Playing catch-up with Amazon as normal, who have had this for ages.
Unless my third party listing app implements it on their system I doubt that I will.
eBay already have many ways of making offers, which many sellers use, like buy 2 and get 10% off etc. I use the “buy 3 items and get £5.00 off” offer, which is a saving of the cost of postage, which is included on each item.
But if the buyer doesn’t add the items to the basket / cart, it won’t work.
And it won’t work if the buyer is overseas, because unless they log out of their site and log in again on UK Ebay,, the basket won’t appear and they won’t be able to use it.
And it won’t work if the Ebay system is having *problems*, as the items will be charged separately even if the customer does use the basket.
Ebay could sort this by having ONE checkout, but they can’t be ars*d, because they get all those fvf fees (non refundable) on each checkout error.
Another worrying thought :-
Ebay’s only tactic to boost sales appears to be to try to get sellers to offer more and more discounts.
If Ebay CUT seller fees, then sellers could AFFORD to sell items at a lower price.
So come on Ebay, how about it, cut your ****ing fees and share some of the pain in offering cheaper items on your site.
Fat chance.
Can’t wait to see how big next year’s fee hikes will be !
Bet they charge FVFs on fhe pre-discounted price multiplied by how many you sell ?
would be nice if maybe they could start on the postage side… multi variation listings that can’t apply different postage charges to different items. That would make a difference. if i have a listing with 50g item and also a 3kg item… there is no way to do different prices for postage. so although if doing free postage you build it in to the price, for the postage upgrade option say a 24hr courier for the 50g would be the same as the 3kg. With us that could be a quite a difference. The buyer of the 50 g item will end up paying far more than they need to. Plus of course when it comes to returns etc… as you can’t add individual weights to the details you leave it blank and this can cause issues if the system assumes a 5kg item is actually 1 kg etc.
All in all ebay need to look at the faults and short comings in the existing system before creating more half baked ideas.
Why can they never bring in a system that just works across the board, why does it alwys have to have limitations here there and everywhere? Hell my own basic website has more buying and posting functionality that ebay!