For retailers grossing 1-5 million on a yearly basis, eBay is a battlefield that they cannot afford to lose: the popular marketplace is the arena for nearly one quarter of small and medium retailers’ sales. As a recent report by Channeladvisor indicates, 16.0%-28.20% of its retailers’ gross monthly volume is attributed to sales on their eBay channel.Unlike repricing on Amazon, repricing on eBay is not a race-to-the-bottom dollar war. On eBay, effectively applying dynamic pricing techniques means that you’ll have to get to into the nuts and bolts of this bargain-hunter marketplace.
What it takes to get traffic to your eBay listings
Here’s a spoiler: it’s all about the Best Match.
Consumers come to eBay for the bargain feel, but they don’t have time to trawl through listings. So, grab the top positions in eBay search and you’ve got their attention and dollars. You’ll need the following criteria to be a “Best Match”:
- High feedback score of at least 500 and above 99.0% positive feedback.
- Top-rated seller status or listings in the top-rated listings. This requires a Detailed Seller Rating (DSR) of at least 4.6 on all of eBay’s criteria. Top-rated seller status signals reliability, fairness, and honesty to the buyer.
- Sales history: moving up in eBay search results depends on the sales velocity of the item you’re selling: the more buyers have purchased a specific item, the more relevant this item becomes in the specific search results. That is considered one of the most dominant factors in setting up a certain listing position on eBay.
Hack eBay’s “Best Match” with the right repricing techniques and tools.
After working with top-tier eBay sellers and experimenting in various capacities, our pricing analyst team came up with few strategies to significantly improve your ranking in search results and expedite the timeframe needed to achieve the improved ranking. Since “Best Match” is the key factor to boost eBay sales, our strategies focus on getting high visibility in eBay Best Match searches.
Some of our strategies require a pricing automation tool – specifically, an eBay repricer tool, to manage price changes in real-time. Intrinsically, having the “right price” is correlated with high visibility on eBay search results, as pricing makes the listing stand out as a genuine bargain.
In general, you can use price to generate short-term high visibility and buyers that sort by “price” will get that listing among the first results. Once you can attract more buyers with pricing, you will be able to create the sales history you need for long-term high visibility. Buyers that use the default “best match” search will get your listing among the top search results once a significant sales history has been created.
1. Aggressive pricing: the bottom dollar strategy
Position your listing as lowest in the market. Set yourself as a price leader for this item, regardless of the competitors. You will want to use this tactic sparingly, as this strategy forces you to match or lower the price below any seller that carries the item, even if the competitor is a mom & pop shop liquidating an item at cost. In your repricing tool, you can set a repricing rule to match the lowest market price
2. Match top-rated sellers and top-rated plus listings.
This strategy focuses on matching prices of other top-rated sellers and top-rated plus listings. Top-rated sellers are usually featured on the first few pages of eBay search results. Items that are listed by sellers that qualify for top-rated status will also have a prime price associated with it. The prime price represents the premium that buyers will pay in order to get an item from a top-rated seller. For instance, a buyer would prefer to pay $150 for pair of sunglasses that is being sold by a seller with 20,000 feedback score, 99.8% positive rating and top-rated status rather than getting the same item for a cheaper price from a seller that is not a top rated seller.
3. Match best match: place yourself “above the fold”
If you want to move up the search indexes and narrow down your competitive circle even more, then consider pricing only based on best match. This will ensure that you’re competing with top sellers that appear in the highest position in eBay’s search results.
Even if your competitors have a decent amount of feedback, a good feedback score and top-rated status, if their listing is not on the first page of search results, then there is a significantly lower chance that buyers will browse and find your competitors’ listing. Eventually, users will go through the first 10 results and will seek the best bargain within that range, disregarding the sellers that are located on pages further back.
You’ll want to position your pricing according to the results on the first page search results. With this repricing rule, you will match and compete with sellers that appear first in the specific search page for a particular item. The lowest priced items won’t be necessarily positioned first in the search results, as the position is set by the Best Match – which is dependent on your own seller feedback and sales history.
In this case, we recommend setting the rule only to include sellers with high visibility or listings in the first 25 search results.
Here’s our visualization for the pricing rule setup if you pick this strategy:
4. Target specific sellers on your watch list.
Use this pricing rule if you want to set a pricing snipper that will match competitors’ prices or alter price based on the ups and downs of a specific competitor’s pricing patterns. For example, you can set the rule to be 5% above seller A, so no matter what new price Seller A sets, the pricing rule will automatically adjust your prices to be 5% above or below seller’s A listed price.
5. Combined pricing rule.
This is a pricing rule that utilizes a combination of the aforementioned rules. The rule sets the combined parameters of previous rules we’ve discussed in this post and sets your price at the lowest price point between all of the rules. We recommend enabling the following parameters:
- Top Rated – Price below the first 3 top-rated listings and sellers.
- Best Match – Price below the first 3 top competitors that appear in the highest 3 positions in the search results.
- Target Key Competitors – Below the price point of your main competitors.
Here’s a visualization of how this combination rule would look in WisePricer:
We hope that these strategies helped you. Do you have eBay hacks to share? We’d love to hear how retailers have used pricing tools like WisePricer to boost their sales on eBay. Feel free to share your tips and tricks with us in the comments section, or via email!
This blog post was written with Valentina Fung, Content Strategist at Wiser.
