There was a time when being in the selling business on eBay and other marketplaces meant managing stocks and keeping track of the sales you made during Holiday Season. It was the time when word of mouth meant everything, and you didn’t have to spend time strategizing and planning your entire year well in advance for the holiday season sales. Things have changed a lot since then, and the Q4 on eBay as a whole depends on how well your Holiday promotions plan is.
Holiday Season Sale: Impact on Sellers
Shoppers seek comfort. The more you provide, the more they appreciate it. Some choose the online mode of shopping because it’s convenient, others because it offers competitive rates for products. And with the COVID-19 on the loose, people have shifted their interest towards the online mode of shopping. The prevention is better than cure theory has led to an exponential growth in the number of online shoppers in the past few months. The number of online shoppers is estimated to grow by 50% in 2021 as compared to 2014.
It’s time you get ready to get your fair share from the crowd. And there are a lot of ways to do that. One of them is selling on multiple platforms. Many marketplaces like eBay alone contribute to this with 182+ million users worldwide. It means your products and services gets attention and your business sees growth. This holiday season sale is bound to break all the previous season sale records. So, get ready with a holiday promotions plan to make an impact on marketplaces like eBay and Amazon.
How to Create a Holiday Promotions Plan
To get a good, worthwhile plan for the holiday season sale you need a calendar. Yes, mark those dates when you know the sales are going to skyrocket. Next, you start planning for each of those dates separately. And finally, implement the plan you created when the time comes.
Holiday promotions are nothing but a set of perfectly orchestrated plans—one for each month or festival like Halloween, Cyber Week, Christmas and more on eBay, Amazon, or any other marketplace you sell. You can also take guidance from preparation tips for Black Friday and Cyber Monday to know more about preparations. The surge during holiday season sales can get tapped and used to your benefit if you take a right and smart steps moving forward. If not, it is a disaster waiting to happen, when the holiday sales begin.
So, here is a list of Do’s and Don’ts to help you out with holiday promotions on marketplaces like eBay, Amazon, and other platforms when the holiday season sales arrive.
Holiday Promotions: Do’s and Don’ts
The DO’s of Holiday Promotions
Do Not Overlook The Minor Dates
Only focusing on grand dates will make you miss out on the massive sales opportunity. Sellers are often intrigued with Halloween, Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Christmas. Of course, they are the highest-grossing events of the year but no catering to the other holidays can be bad for business.
Do not overlook dates like Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday, Green Monday, Free Shipping Day and Boxing Day. As they alone can make your sales go up with proper holiday promotions and planning. Cyber Monday made more sales when compared to Black Friday last year. So, better focus on every opportunity Q4 brings forth.
Do Not Use Immoral Price Mark-Ups
It is a common trend among many retailers to increase the price for the commodities on store a few weeks before the holiday season sale begins. Only to offer a discount later and sell the very same products at their original price.
You wouldn’t do it, but it’s always wise to keep yourself focused such that you do not indulge in any immoral practices in search of profits. It may work, but the customers are getting pickier. They browse, do their research and then make that purchase. If you get caught, it’ll not only hamper your sales. Still, it will also adversely affect your reputation and prospects of your business. And that’s a high price to pay for a small profit margin.
Do Not Forget To Retarget Your Customers
Holiday planning often ignores the existing customer base and focuses on acquiring new potential customers for holiday season sales. It is never a bad idea to broaden your customer base but missing out on potential sales in the process is never acceptable.
Online Advertisements targeted towards your customers who previously visited your store happens to be one of the best holiday promotions to get repeat customers. The holiday season is the time when people search for the best gifts and products to buy. Retargeting will help them remember you when it’s time to make that purchase.
Do Not Manage Multiple Platforms Individually
Many sellers who get indulged in multichannel selling operations have to deal with the management of inventory, orders, and shipments for each marketplace separately. It often leads to problems like overselling, cancellations on orders and many other complications.
Getting the store and marketplaces integrated using helpful apps can reduce the time, and energy one invests in the entire process. With this saved time, you can focus on other aspects of selling.
The Do’s of Holiday Promotions
Order Enough Inventory
Perform extensive research on the estimated sales for the holiday and season and prepare the inventory.
Be sure you have the tools to manage inventory when the time comes if you are selling in multiple platforms. Or you can always opt for an integration application that can help you with the entire order and inventory management across all the platforms you sell.
Give Free Shipping Offers
According to “Free Shipping and Repeat Buying on the Internet: Theory and Evidence”. A research conducted by David R. Bell et al. The free shipping finds its place in the topmost position in the list of most effective marketing strategies. They found that whenever shoppers find a fixed fee or a free shipping option it increased their purchase quantity. It makes shipping price the most critical and effective strategy which should never get overlooked.
With that knowledge and the holiday season in mind, free shipping is worthy of your consideration. And why shouldn’t you! Make sure to include the free shipping your customers want in your holiday promotion plan.
Engage On Social Media Platforms
Well, Social media happens to be in the limelight among millennials today. They are highly active and spend most of their time on these social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.
Using social media and getting a vast amount of engagements on these posts becomes a highly preferred thing to happen. But, not being there to reply and help potential customers with their queries means losing customers.
Optimize Your Store For Peak Hours
Online stores have to get prepared for a surge in traffic at all times. Especially if you’re targeting the black Friday and Cyber Monday sales. With that said, you also need to know the fact that most online stores never prepare for it. And this sudden influx of shoppers on the peak hours results in a slow page load speed, failed payments, at times even crashing of sites. If this happens to you, it’ll affect your sales and of course, the reputation.
Hoping things will go well do not count as a strategy. Instead, it’s a plan devised to fail. Getting your store optimized to keep it up and running during these hyperactive hours is the only way forward. Perform testings, reducing site load time for mobile phones and desktops and switching to CDNs (Content Delivery Network) often works.
Include A Dedicated Holiday Landing Page
When people visit your sites during holidays, they search for discounts and coupon codes. Also, almost every buyer likes to see the best offers on the most popular products that you have to offer on display.
It introduces you to a new requirement for your store. Plan a holiday-specific landing page for your store that can guide people with what’s on offer. These present a quick buy and checkout option to the buyers as they can browse through the catalogue you present.
Bonus Tips
Don’ts of eBay Store
Do Not Use Bad Photographs
Product Images on any marketplace, speaks a lot. They represent the product you sell. Having a bad image placed for a great product harms sales. If you’re a seasoned eBay seller, you might have experienced it. And if you’re starting on eBay, you must keep it in mind to provide the best quality images.
The problem with image upload will get solved if you follow these rules. Try not to use a mobile phone to take a picture. Use a white background for the product images and keep the image pixels to above 1600*800px. Also, eBay stores let you upload 12 images per product, using it to the full extent. And, stay away from adding watermarks, and borders to the pictures.
Do Not List In Wrong Categories
Holiday season sales sure mean people are out there searching for products to buy, but that doesn’t mean you can list your products in wrong categories.
Let’s take an example, listing a T-Shirt under the eBay store’s Shirts category won’t fetch it any buyers. It happens because people who want to buy a T-Shirt will look in its respective category and not under Shirts category. When you as a seller do so, it leads to a minimized to no sale of the product. So, you need to try and refrain from this practice.
Do’s Of eBay Store
Sign Up For Guaranteed Delivery
If you’ve not yet opted for it, now is the time. Get yourself registered on Guaranteed Delivery if you’re a store with more than 100 transactions in a year, 5% or less late shipment rate, and handling time of 1 day or less.
It not only helps you gain customers trust but also gain orders as the holiday season means people want their orders delivered on time. Registering for the Guaranteed Delivery also helps boost the visibility of your products on eBay. You Holiday promotion stratey for eBay needs it.
Use eBay Pricing Guidance
Your pricing affects product visibility on eBay. It also happens to be one of the deciding factors whether your product sells or not. You can research the correct value for the product you’re offering. Once done, adjust the price based on other competitors for a similar product. It’ll positively improve the chances of making a sale.
You can also perform extensive research with Terapeak. It is an eBay insight tool that delivers statistical information and market trends from across 22 global marketplaces.
Increase Your Outreach With eBay
eBay happens to be one of the leading marketplaces for goods and commodities with millions of buyers making purchases every day. Starting out on eBay gets you a bigger audience. If you’re already managing a store you can integrate the store with eBay.
Integrating the eBay account is one of the best ways to get rid of the additional work pressure that managing different aspects of selling on various fronts brings. When you integrate your store with the eBay store account, you are free to address both the platforms through the application.
As a store owner, you can integrate your eBay account with any of the frameworks you operate on. The app lets you integrate Magento, Shopify, BigCommerce, or WooCommerce frameworks with your eBay store.
Keeping your eyes peeled for these small mistakes and going ahead with quick tips for eBay will get you your perfect Holiday promotions. Want more insights about problems eBay sellers face during Holiday Season and how to resolve them? :: Read Here
Final Thoughts
As an eBay seller, your holiday promotions covers many areas to drive sales. The process is lengthy, and sometimes you can forget to check a few things off your list. It is also a common scenario where sellers indulge in practices which you wouldn’t want to be a part of.
Always remember, you have to do your best to succeed. Anticipate what’s coming and follow this list of Do’s and Don’ts as a reminder before you walk into holiday season sales.
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