These 20% off and 15% ebay coupons are tricks

[theseeker_jamrock]

Why are $300 phones suddenly increased to over $500 and only older models are being offered ? With the 20% off phones may end up costing you more than the original price in some cases. Other categories may be better but the cellphone category as gone to the dogs. I have personally seen sellers increase the prices more than 40% to give a so called 20% off.

[simba6]

Yes, one must be a wise shopper and check prices with great care to insure the best value for their money. Sales, promo deals and coupons may not be the great buy they claim to be.

[stainlessenginecovers]

The coupons are from Ebay and have NOTHING to do with the seller or the sellers price or the amount of $$ the seller gets. 

Meaning- the Seller STILL GETS their regular price so there is NO reason to 'raise prices'...except for 'other' reasons having NOTHING to do with the coupons. 

[sapphire_studio]

I thought that they split the discount. Those featured stores agree to eat half of the percentage and Ebay eats the other half.

I heard some Pokemon card sellers talking about it on a YouTube video.

[valueaddedresource]

@stainlessenginecovers  @sapphire_studio  I believe the current NewYearDeal Extra 20% off is likely being funded in whole or in part by the participating sellers, not completely by eBay.

https://www.ebay.com/e/daily-deals/24-rw1-ny-main?_trkparms=pageci%3A8d2b686e-a8d0-11ee-9f8e-d2e68cb...

You can see they're drawing from sellers/items in Daily Deals and the terms and conditions has this list of events:

That's typically an indication the participating sellers are funding some or all of the discount.

I've personally worked for a company that participated in Daily Deals before and can say that sometimes eBay will offer to subsidize part of the discount, so it's very possible it could be a 50/50 split, but typically sellers are required to sign NDAs about these kinds of deals so I'd be surprised to hear a seller talking about it on YouTube.

It's also not uncommon in my experience to see these sellers engaging in some pretty sketchy practices, particularly with false strikethrough pricing to offer fake discounts that really are not much, if any, savings at all.

eBay removed the link to sales history from the listing page, which makes it even harder for consumers to do the research to see if they are really getting a deal, but for now at least you can still manually get there.

Just copy this link https://www.ebay.com/bin/purchaseHistory?item=xxxxxx  and replace the xs with the item number for the listing you want to check.

[sapphire_studio]

Yeah the large Pokémon sellers that were talking about on YouTube were not the ones that were actually selling the Pokemon card boxes that were temporary discounted by ebay (one of them deals more with large cost single cards to the eBay Vault and the other one does the eBay live thing and neither does a lot of modern sealed like what was on sale). They were just mentioning the great price on booster boxes because of that coupon and they said that the participating eBay sellers are probably splitting the discount 50/50 with eBay because that's usually how it works.

I did have a hard time finding information about it while Googling so that whole NDA thing makes sense.

Obviously in the past when there was 15% off coupons that were store wide eBay ate that entire cost. But I'm pretty sure when it's store specific those stores are opting in to pay some of the discount (just like you said).

[stainlessenginecovers]

Well then, they may 'split it' or sellers do it 100%, either way, with this new invention, the internet, NO ONE would buy a $1000 item for 20% off netting $800 when ANYONE can EASILY search online and find that phone for $500....so IF sellers are doing that

a.) it's the SELLERS and not the site (ebay)

b.) Sellers will get no sales from doing this so what would the point be? 

[valueaddedresource]

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@sapphire_studio wrote:

Yeah the large Pokémon sellers that were talking about on YouTube were not the ones that were actually selling the Pokemon card boxes that were temporary discounted by ebay (one of them deals more with large cost single cards to the eBay Vault and the other one does the eBay live thing and neither does a lot of modern sealed like what was on sale). They were just mentioning the great price on booster boxes because of that coupon and they said that the participating eBay sellers are probably splitting the discount 50/50 with eBay because that's usually how it works.

I did have a hard time finding information about it while Googling so that whole NDA thing makes sense.

Obviously in the past when there was 15% off coupons that were store wide eBay ate that entire cost. But I'm pretty sure when it's store specific those stores are opting in to pay some of the discount (just like you said).

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@sapphire_studio yeah the current CEO has very explicitly distanced himself from those sitewide coupons that were so frequent under Wenig.

In fact, he was asked about it again on the most recent earnings call and said most of what they are doing is seller funded or at least "in partnership" with sellers. Of course he left himself a little wiggle room by saying sellers are "kind of" funding those coupons. 😉

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4648867-ebay-inc-ebay-q3-2023-earnings-call-transcript

Deepak Mathivanan

Great. Thanks for taking the questions. Jamie, given that consumers are increasingly looking at deal shopping during this holiday season due to macro pressures and inflationary environment, some of the other e-commerce platforms like Etsy are kind of incentivizing sellers to step up discounts and are also doing promos on their own to drive volume.

Jamie Iannone

Yeah Deepak, the only real couponing and promotion stuff we do, we do it in conjunction with our sellers, where they are kind of funding those coupons. And that does work, and that's in partnership with our sellers. We sometimes also do that with our external promotional listings products that we've been talking about, one of our new ad products. But we really moved away from the couponing that was unhealthy that we did back in 2019. And we have no plans to reintroduce that type of couponing because it wasn't driving the type of ROI that we wanted.

[valueaddedresource]

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@stainlessenginecovers wrote:

Well then, they may 'split it' or sellers do it 100%, either way, with this new invention, the internet, NO ONE would buy a $1000 item for 20% off netting $800 when ANYONE can EASILY search online and find that phone for $500....so IF sellers are doing that

a.) it's the SELLERS and not the site (ebay)

b.) Sellers will get no sales from doing this so what would the point be? 

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@stainlessenginecovers respectfully, it's just not that simple.

The lines between seller and site get a little blurry in a lot of these scenarios as eBay is increasingly more than "just a venue" and in many cases, the sellers engaging in these practices are part of special programs like eBay Refurbished and Daily Deals that are supposed to entail additional vetting, meeting certain qualifying criteria (as established and monitored by eBay) and/or direct cooperation between eBay and the sellers.

This isn't like Joe Average seller creating and running their own coupon where eBay may be able to claim ignorance, these are opportunities for prime placement and promotion on the site that they work directly with sellers on, which may even include actual contracts between eBay and the seller agreeing to provide x qty of desired product at y agreed upon price for z amount of time with discount or subsidy terms spelled out in explicit detail complete with NDAs.

Again, I have personally been the one reading and signing such agreements at a previous place of employment, so I'm not just pulling this out of nowhere.

eBay absolutely could put into those agreements that these sellers must provide valid proof of previous pricing to use strikethroughs and that they are not allowed to increase the price a certain amount of hours or days before the discount event goes live - and then actually enforce those provisions. They simply choose not to.

Also keep in mind in addition to the Final Value Fees eBay makes (which conveniently aren't reduced by these fake discounts because the total price often ends up being the same as previous sales with no discount), they also often earn additional revenue in the form of ad fees from many of these sellers, so there is a financial incentive for eBay to look the other way.

And as I said, eBay even proactively made it harder for consumers to check the past selling price to "catch" the sketchy sellers in the act by removing the link to sales history that used to be directly on the listing page.

While I won't name names in order to keep within the rules of this community, it took me less than 5 minutes today to find 5 examples of listings in this current NEWYEARDEAL sale that not only were using outrageously fake strikethrough pricing, they also increased their actual Buy It Now price literally 24 hours or less before the coupon went live conveniently to the exact amount needed so that when the buyer applies the supposed "extra" 20% off, they end up paying the exact price the item had been listed at the day before without a discount.

All of these were large multi-national, multi-billion dollar brands directly selling items on their official eBay stores.

These kinds of fake strikethrough pricing and increasing prices just before a "sale" tactics are explicitly called out as bad business practices by the FTC and I do not believe for one second that eBay and these brands are not fully aware of the harm they are doing to consumers.

Udemy, Lenovo and others have been sued and paid millions in settlements for this exact thing.

eBay has also shown they absolutely have the capability to act to curb these anti-consumer practices, but only when they are forced to do so - like in Australia where regulations required them to implement a Comparative Pricing Policy last year, with very explicit requirements for proof of previous prices and stiff penalties for using fake strikethroughs.

https://community.ebay.com.au/t5/eBay-Announcements/We-re-introducing-a-new-Comparative-pricing-poli... 

https://www.ebay.com.au/help/policies/listing-policies/comparative-pricing-policy?id=4711 

As to your second point - all I can say is many of these brands are repeat, habitual offenders on eBay and if you look at the sales history on these items it is quite clear that engaging in this behavior does not in fact result in "no sales" from doing it.

I highly recommend @theseeker_jamrock and anyone else who encounters these practices on eBay or anywhere else report every single instance to the FTC.

https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/#/assistant