Community Chat, Feb 6 from 1:00 pm PT - Seasonality

[doug@ebay]

Join us for an hour to talk seasonality and how it affects your eBay business with Jen Deal and Vince Bates from customer marketing. Learn what eBay tools are available to drive conversions and visibility in peak selling periods. Now’s the chance to ask seasonality related questions.

Jen will also be on the eBay for Business Facebook broadcast today from 12:30 PST to 1:00 PST.

Looking forward to your seasonality questions!

[coinslabz26]

I am a seller of rare certified coins. It seems that the season does not effect selling coins a whole lot. I had a nice Christmas rush 2018 but most years it is when I sell the least coins.

Tax time does usually see a larger increase in sales of big ticket items.

The ebay bucks specials in December had a strongly positive impact on sales and probably was the driving force behind our stronger then average sales. I was also disappointed to see coins excluded from many coupon events. I understand bullion exclusions but numismatic classic coins are an item like everything else.

The ebay bucks specials this past Christmas will hopefully help ebay this quarter. I know I was able to clear out a lot of stale inventory and I reinvested in fresh inventory. This led to a pre tax time January ebay bill to be my 3rd highest ever, so that probably helped ebay as well.

[scene.of.the.crop]

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@my-cottage-books-and-antiques wrote:
The seasonal info is interesting. Would ebay consider providing us with dates in advance when they actually run their Seasonal Marketing campaigns?

The stuff listed for each seasonal campaign--- is that based on buyer search data? One thing seems to be missing: almost anything vintage (I do see vintage valentines, but we sold a lot of vintage Christmas decor etc. Vintage Halloween stuff is very collectible, too.

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Hi, @my-cottage-books-and-antiques . Glad to see you in the chat.  The calendar we posted on the playbook is actually info we pulled together with the help of eBay merchandisers and analysts, and it includes planning and peak selling periods closely aligned to what we see happening on the site. That should help you. 

Vintage items are definitely popular especially around Valentine's Day, Halloween and Christmas as you pointed out. We started to see Vintage Valentine's rising a couple of weeks ago as buyers were starting to plan for the big heart day.  It's a great call out.  Let me look into pulling out more info about vintage items.  Thank you for the feedback!

[scene.of.the.crop]

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@dtexley3 wrote:

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@scene.of.the.crop wrote:

If you use seller hub (recommend), you can click on the growth tab and also check inventory seasonality based on real sales data from the site.  eBay also sends inventory insights in email to sellers frequently selling in categories where we have insight to share. More of those to come that will be specific to retail moments.  

Hope that helps!
Jennifer

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I read this and thought it was odd because I've never seen anything like that on the growth tab.  So I checked, and I don't see anything like what you describe.  All I find is the (still) useless recommendations to drop my price and offer free shipping. 

Where would we expect to find any useful information on seasonal inventory there?

I'm also not aware of any pages showing  inventory seasonality based on real sales data and have been in threads where people have asked about this type of data with little response on where it actually is.

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Hi, @dtexley3 .   It may not be very intuitive on how to search seasonality in the growth tab. The tab still continues to be work in progress (we also have Terapeak by the way with many details).  Here's a screen shot of the tab and what you might find there.  Click on growth tab, sourcing guidance in left hand navigation, select a category and you'll see seasonality. You can also drop down further on the page and look at different aspects of various items to get an indexing of how easily we think you can sell more of an item within a category on eBay based on the sales data we have. 

[carolynnq]

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@my-cottage-books-and-antiques wrote:
... One thing seems to be missing: almost anything vintage (I do see vintage valentines, but we sold a lot of vintage Christmas decor etc. Vintage Halloween stuff is very collectible, too.

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Over the years, I've sold (and purchased) a lot of vintage items for Mother's Day, Father's Day, graduation, and Christmas gifts: yearbooks, perfumes that are no longer made, favorite books or toys from childhood, antique books in the area of expertise of a new graduate, photographs or postcards of a town as it used to be, etc.

The RL antique site has a great gift ideas page where you first choose who you want a gift for (wife, young boy, female boss, man, etc.). Choosing one of those options takes you to a page with categories of items. I'd love to see ebay do something like that. Besides suggesting gift ideas, it's a way for people unfamiliar with the site to narrow down options when they're not familiar with category searching.

[coinslabz26]

To drive sales would ebay's marketing team ever consider offering seasonal sales goals and FVF discounts to drive sellers to sell more items? Instead of driving growth by divisive methods like the uncontrollable return reason penalty fees, couldn't a teamwork method of trying to convince sellers to sacrifice some profit for a bigger goal be a better way to sell more?

Also for the marketing team. Will ebay have the send watcher an offer feature available to more sellers in time for the slower summer months?

[vrykalak]

Somebody mentioned on eBay Live that she tweaks titles to include Valentines Day on certain seasonal items. I do that too...if there's room in the title without eliminating important keywords.
I also have a banner at the top of my Descriptions (that is almost always commented out, but I show it when a holiday is coming up)
Right now it says "Someone on your Valentines Day gift list would love this"
A month or two from now, it will say: "Think Mothers Day - Think Fathers Day"

[nobody*s_perfect]

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@scene.of.the.crop wrote:

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@bestdealinparts wrote: ... in the new page info is all over, making it hard to use.

1. Design needs to be more compact, there is too much empty space, resulting in too much scrolling, too many clicks. The vertical design of the old page worked better ...

2. We NEED ship from a different zip code option, for both USPS & FedEx, USPS sometimes is refusing to accept the packages with a different originating zip ...

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@bestdealinparts  .... You still have all the key features that were in the classic flow ...

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No, not yet.  Designating a "Shipping from" ZIP Code that doesn't match the sender's return address is a key feature that is missing from the new label form.

As noted in the other post, the general format of the new form is unwieldy.

[mam98031]

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@vrykalak wrote:

Somebody mentioned on eBay Live that she tweaks titles to include Valentines Day on certain seasonal items. I do that too...if there's room in the title without eliminating important keywords.
I also have a banner at the top of my Descriptions (that is almost always commented out, but I show it when a holiday is coming up)
Right now it says "Someone on your Valentines Day gift list would love this"
A month or two from now, it will say: "Think Mothers Day - Think Fathers Day"

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Would you mind explaining this more.  How does it help you to get your items seen more?  Are you saying that people put these words into their search when they are trying to locate a gift for a specific occasion?  I'm just curious as I always thought that was a waste of prime real estate [the title].  So I'm interested in understanding this better.

Thank you in advance.

[automotivepartsrecyclrs]

How do you stop another seller from using your pictures on their ebay site? I have one that copied my pictures and is selling the same thing. 

[scene.of.the.crop]

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@coinslabz26 wrote:
To drive sales would ebay's marketing team ever consider offering seasonal sales goals and FVF discounts to drive sellers to sell more items? Instead of driving growth by divisive methods like the uncontrollable return reason penalty fees, couldn't a teamwork method of trying to convince sellers to sacrifice some profit for a bigger goal be a better way to sell more?

Also for the marketing team. Will ebay have the send watcher an offer feature available to more sellers in time for the slower summer months?

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@coinslabz26  Yes! We do actually offer FVF discounts periodically in categories where we see a need for more inventory such as pro audio equipment (just an example).  It's a great idea.  To address your second question, YES!  We can't wait either. It's a feature in high demand. 

[my-cottage-books-and-antiques]

Thanks Jen!

[alan@ebay]

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@automotivepartsrecyclrs wrote:

How do you stop another seller from using your pictures on their ebay site? I have one that copied my pictures and is selling the same thing. 

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Hi @automotivepartsrecyclrs,

We recommend that you contact the seller and request that they don't use the images. 

Thanks. 

[buyselljack2016]

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@nobody*s_perfect wrote:

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@

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@bestdealinparts  .... You still have all the key features that were in the classic flow ...

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No, not yet.  Designating a "Shipping from" ZIP Code that doesn't match the sender's return address is a key feature that is missing from the new label form.

As noted in the other post, the general format of the new form is unwieldy.

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It is there.  Just a pain to use

[vrykalak]

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@mam98031 wrote:

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@vrykalak wrote:

Somebody mentioned on eBay Live that she tweaks titles to include Valentines Day on certain seasonal items. I do that too...if there's room in the title without eliminating important keywords.
I also have a banner at the top of my Descriptions (that is almost always commented out, but I show it when a holiday is coming up)
Right now it says "Someone on your Valentines Day gift list would love this"
A month or two from now, it will say: "Think Mothers Day - Think Fathers Day"

---

Would you mind explaining this more.  How does it help you to get your items seen more?  Are you saying that people put these words into their search when they are trying to locate a gift for a specific occasion?  I'm just curious as I always thought that was a waste of prime real estate [the title].  So I'm interested in understanding this better.

Thank you in advance.

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I doubt if many people put those keywords in their search. 
But once they have the search results in front of them, if they see one labeled "Valentines Day" I think they might be more likely to click through if they were, indeed, looking for a Valentines Day greeting or gift.

[coinslabz26]

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@scene.of.the.crop wrote:

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@coinslabz26 wrote:
To drive sales would ebay's marketing team ever consider offering seasonal sales goals and FVF discounts to drive sellers to sell more items? Instead of driving growth by divisive methods like the uncontrollable return reason penalty fees, couldn't a teamwork method of trying to convince sellers to sacrifice some profit for a bigger goal be a better way to sell more?

Also for the marketing team. Will ebay have the send watcher an offer feature available to more sellers in time for the slower summer months?

---

@coinslabz26  Yes! We do actually offer FVF discounts periodically in categories where we see a need for more inventory such as pro audio equipment (just an example).  It's a great idea.  To address your second question, YES!  We can't wait either. It's a feature in high demand. 

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Yes but every category needs more sales 🙂 That is how ebay makes their commission on the gross sale price and not the seller profit. The more sales that happen, the more ebay makes. Hopefully ebay will consider more incentives to make more sales happen. The above suggestion could make it makes sense for sellers to sell more even if the profit isn't worth the time otherwise.