Store newsletter question

[creativecrisis]

velvet@ebay 

jasmen@ebay 

During a recent community chat, I shared that I was unable to create a newsletter to feature a promotion (versus a coupon). I was told that when I "choose a coupon" in the newsletter creation flow, I should have the option to select a promotion.

I'm trying to create a newsletter right now and the choose a coupon screen (below) does not let me select my current promotion.

As you can see in the following screenshot, I do in fact have an active BOGO promotion running.

Can you please explain what's happening? How do I create a newsletter to  advertise a promotion? I've done this many times in the past, but the "new and improved" newsletter tool doesn't seem to support it.

Thanks.

[gkauthentic]

@simply-the-best-for-you 

That's exactly my point though, if you don't know who your audience is, you are a busy fool.

Ask any marketer if they will do a campaign without being able to know the target audience or review metrics and they will politely walk away whilst laughing at you behind your back. This is what eBay's effort amounts to based on current knowledge of the implementation and taking their feature restrictions into account.

I appreciate that in your use case with 2 subscribers its semantics, but they are promoting a tool and a feature, that is half arsed at best, and insulting to their customers (sellers at worst).

If you are in a competitive marketplace clawing for market share, then you KNOW who your competitors are and can identify them, else its a hobby, with all due respect. However, NOT KNOWING which keys they have to your property thus which doors to deadlock means these types of features eBay is themselves "marketing" (pun intended) are a non starter. I'm a busy enough fool in the cash generator hamster wheel eBay has me spinning for them to be blindly walking into another one lol

Regards

[simply-the-best-for-you]

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@gkauthentic wrote:

@simply-the-best-for-you 

That's exactly my point though, if you don't know who your audience is, you are a busy fool.

Ask any marketer if they will do a campaign without being able to know the target audience or review metrics and they will politely walk away whilst laughing at you behind your back. This is what eBay's effort amounts to based on current knowledge of the implementation and taking their feature restrictions into account.

I appreciate that in your use case with 2 subscribers its semantics, but they are promoting a tool and a feature, that is half arsed at best, and insulting to their customers (sellers at worst).

If you are in a competitive marketplace clawing for market share, then you KNOW who your competitors are and can identify them, else its a hobby, with all due respect. However, NOT KNOWING which keys they have to your property thus which doors to deadlock means these types of features eBay is themselves "marketing" (pun intended) are a non starter. I'm a busy enough fool in the cash generator hamster wheel eBay has me spinning for them to be blindly walking into another one lol

Regards

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I don't disagree.  When you said "Yes, but do you know "who" those subscribers are? What if you have competitors on that list?"  I wasn't sure if you were asking a question or making a statement, so I answered the question.

These coupons have done nothing for me.  I have no desire to waste a bunch of time creating coupons &/or newsletters & not be able to target them to who I want (only repeat buyers) & it drives me crazy that they must have a photo.  The only thing a coupon needs is text to be able to say "20% off for repeat buyers" or whatever.   No fancy photo is necessary.  But they don't allow that (talked to the developers) , nor do they allow me to target only repeat buyers.  Both of those were by design.  Well, that's what I want to do.   I explained my logic to the developer & he was like, 'yeah, good idea, but no you can't do that' LOL. 

Like many things on eBay, it seems they didn't poll the users to see what was needed & just created something that doesn't really align with what users want.  

[gkauthentic]

@simply-the-best-for-you 

Sure, in principle I want eBay to provide the "right answer", not just an answer, but between us  I was asking a rhetorical question to make the point that core functionality is missing thus the platform has some significant holes as far as seller vs seller anonymity is concerned which hurts hard working sellers and helps copycats which ultimately hurts innovation.

I can't say that Coupons are completely useless imo, but I can say that by and large users don't understand how to use them. The mixed use of Coupon and then Voucher by eBay doesn't help, but neither does the process. By an large customers are ignorant and lazy, such that the majority miss out on taking advantage of the deal despite my best efforts to make them informed and provide step by step instructions, only a small fraction comprehend what to do and leverage the discounts offered, as seen in my orders list.

There are other terminologies that are completely lost on the buyers, but I wont go into that now, no point going down a dead end.

I agree that the design should be flexible. The design they are forcing upon you is only or the purpose of rendering a page on a browser or mobile app, so they need a picture + text for that. The printed coupon (PDF version/paper flyer ) doesn't have any of that.

I completely agree that the Design and Development teams are completely detached from the user base. Dev decisions are carried out in the US in meeting rooms driven by product managers and segregated into different projects, so the Marketing Dev team vs the Sales Dev team could be geographically apart as well as collaboratively apart. Perhaps, the product managers correspond in higher level meetings, perhaps, but the outcome is not great. More complexity, more mess, more things broken, features removed, etc.

Here hopes that some of these conversations sink in with the behemoth.

[simply-the-best-for-you]

@gkauthentic   Can't disagree with you.  Worked in IT & Development my entire working life & for a very successful software company.   The only thing I'll add & I have stated such here many times is that for most companies, development is driven by 3 events - user request, product offering changes & legal changes.  Rarely do most co's change things to "update the look & feel".   Sometimes that's the result b/c of changes driven by one of the 3 things I just mentioned, but they don't update just to update.   eBay does that constantly & it drives both buyers & sellers crazy.  I acknowledge that the web is a different animal than insurance co's & banks & none of us would be happy if the site looked like it did in 97, when I started.  But when the only goal is to update look & feel, it makes for a lot of disjointed results.  Esp if much of your development team is overseas.  

With eBay, there is no direct line for user requests, so the company takes it on itself to decide what the users want, with disastrous results much of the time that are very out of step with what their user base wants & needs.