Shopping always tops everyone’s list when prioritizing tasks for the upcoming holidays. With the beginning of this year’s holiday season, the customers will be looking for anything but an excuse to go on a shopping spree when the eBay sale comes up. And this is the reason why sellers have been found searching for the best eBay strategy for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. A trend has also emerged where sellers perform rigorous research during the Christmas Holidays to develop effective and efficient seller promotion ideas for eBay right before the Festive season. It helps them create the best possible ebay Holiday marketing strategies.
This calls for me to jump in and assist you with some of the best eBay Marketing Strategies and Tips through this festive season guide. It’ll help you build an excellent marketing strategy for the upcoming Holiday season sale on eBay.
How is the Holiday season 2020 different for eBay sellers?
The ongoing COVID-19 has made sure that sellers improvise and buyers adapt to overcome the pandemic’s problems. And this led to an exponential increase in the number of online buyers globally.
This holiday season, eBay sales won’t be any different. We will see an increase in the number of customers lining up for Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals. With an increasing customer’s inclination towards online shopping in the last few months, be prepared to witness the highest-grossing Holiday season ever. This surge won’t stop with BFCM but will go on till the end of the year, the Christmas sale.
Essential dates for eBay sellers this Holiday season?
It is a question that often finds its way into the mind of new sellers, and so it needs to be addressed first. The Q4 brings an opportunity for sellers to establish themselves as a force to reckon with in retail sales. It gives equal and ample opportunity to both set and new sellers to gain new customers as well.
2019 saw an 8% increase in digital spend with over $723 Billion of revenue globally during the holiday season. This makes the Holiday season a three-month-long fest showcasing what proper Holiday marketing strategies can achieve on eBay.
Upcoming Holiday Season
Every year happens to have a gala event for sellers and customers alike. It’s simple. The customers buy while the sellers sell. What’s important is that you make sure you are selling too. The first step to make this happen is to know the dates. The most important sales-specific date every seller needs to keep an eye on is the trio of Q4.
#1. Halloween
No matter your age or how many times a day you go around your block, Halloween’s always different every year for children and adults alike. Halloween costumes, candies, and trick or treat are something that presents a great sales opportunity for you.
#2. Thanksgiving Weekend (BFCM)
It happens to be the most-awaited and highest-grossing event of the entire year. Starting with Thanksgiving and going ahead with Black Friday Sales, Small Saturday, and ultimately ending with Cyber Monday sales. It calls for you to put your best leg forward to maximize your sales.
#3. Christmas
Christmas is all about presents and decorations. People love giving gifts to each other to cherish their year-long memories. This is the last selling opportunity of the year for all the sellers across the globe and opens up a window for you to come up with innovative selling ideas for gifts and decorations.
These three holidays are like the three pillars of the entire holiday season: Singles Day (a trendy Chinese holiday), Super Saturday, Boxing Day, and more.
Start Now for Holiday Season
The real question is how a seller can be a part of this mega event maximizing every aspect of selling without incurring losses. The answer is quite simple, start selling smart. There are three possible ways to get this done and let’s understand each one separately.
#1. Start Selling Online This Holiday Season
This happens to be an essential thing to do. To sell through online channels, you need to mark your presence in the online world.
Stepping up a notch and selling on marketplaces like eBay or starting your online store through Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, or other frameworks is the path forward to it. You can even hire experts to help build and design the store you want. It’s cheap, easy, and takes away all the workload it brings.
#2. Store Owners can start selling on eBay
If you already have a store and are making a killing out of it, it’s time you took your game to a new level. Start selling on marketplaces like eBay. This will get you to a much wider audience and give you a chance to handle orders globally.
The festive season is the season the entire world celebrates. And having buyers from different corners of the world is never going to hurt.
#3. Integrate eBay: Holiday Season Hack
If you happen to be the one who wants to be omnipresent, you might already be selling on eBay while managing your store. This is no simple feat. Juggling between two different selling platforms, managing inventory, shipping, and orders is tough. Much sooner than later, it’s bound to take a toll on you.
In my opinion, the intelligent approach to this is, integrating the selling channels and automating everything. There are integration apps out there to help you integrate your eBay account with Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, or WooCommerce stores you own. It is a practical approach to maintain an excellent work-life balance and keep yourself from going nuts managing everything.
How can you sell efficiently on eBay?
Selling on eBay happens to be both accessible and complicated if you happen to ignore their guidelines and policies. If you’re a newbie, you need to know it. And if you happen to be someone who’s been selling on eBay for a long but have struggled with sales, you need this piece of advice too. The most simple things that any seller can do to come forward as reliable, reasonable, and worth buying from are listed below.
#1. Product Images
A common mistake made by sellers while listing their products on eBay happens to be posting a bad quality image. No one wants to buy a product without actually seeing what they’re putting their money into.
eBay gives sellers an option to upload multiple images for the product. Utilize the opportunity and upload good-quality pictures from every angle and side. Make sure your images convey the size and natural product properties.
#2. Item Description
eBay ranks your product based on the product description, and buyers see them in relevant searches. The report categorizes the product and provides a clear picture of what the product is to the user.
What you should do is write your description on eBay. It should be accurate and not copied from the manufacturers or, in some cases, competitors. Writing a clear and informative text for potential customers ensures they get all the information they need about the product. Also include the relevant keywords to get a better chance at ranking in searches.
#3. Seller Rating
Try to achieve a good seller rating on eBay. It will not only give you leverage over other sellers but will also make customers trust you more. Any seller with good feedback and rating will have more sales as everyone wants to be in business with someone they can bank on.
#4. Expand to other eBay sites
eBay has basic and advanced international selling programs for its sellers interested in making global sales. You can always enlist in one of them and start making sales globally. It enables international visitors to view your products and lets you list the products on international eBay sites. This can come in handy this festive season as you can target a vast audience through these eBay seller programs.
Holiday Marketing Strategies
Now that we know the list of critical upcoming holidays and initiate a good sale on eBay. Let’s move on to the last part of our eBay holiday season guide, i.e., eBay Holiday Marketing Strategies. It will do wonders for you, as they do for every seller.
Proper planning goes into everything. When you started selling online, you planned everything. Who your manufacturer will be, how you’re going to fulfill your orders, the warehouses, the storage units to be used for inventory, and much more with intricate details. Similar planning and strategic approach are required when we plan for the eBay holiday marketing strategies.
#1. Social Media Promotion
Social Media promotions happen to be the way to get the attention of millennials today. The problem comes forth when you don’t know how to get through the complex situation of using this tool in your favor.
The hashtag is the key. Identifying the trending hashtags and using them in your posts can make your seat available to a bigger crowd. But don’t forget that you’ve to use a relevant hashtag for it to prove useful. Selling shoes while using hashtags for flip-flops ain’t going to help your cause.
Also, you can use hashtags on a lot of social media channels like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and more. So, make sure you are sharing your post on all of them to increase your brand visibility.
#2. Special Offers for Loyal Customers
Yes, it’s the festive season, and we all want offers we can’t resist. So, this might be the time you let your customers know of the exclusive offers that await them. Use email marketing and Short Message Service to let your previous buyers see that you care for them. Giving them an extra discount or unique coupon codes can work wonders for your sales boost.
#3. Flash Sales
Flash Sales have gained a new fan base in the past few years. It has an added assurance that the number of products you’ll make available will have buyers already glued to their screens.
Adding flash sales to your store for popular items can be very beneficial. Having adequately planned flash sales keeps the customers waiting for more. Because they fear missing out on their chance to grab the deals you have to offer due to competition.
#4. Referral Program
Introducing referral programs is a proven method that works. People being socially active tend to seek suggestions and opinions when selecting anything. A nicely orchestrated referral program can land you many customers if you are willing to work on its delivery, promotion, and offer.
#5. Add Countdown Timer
I often say, “An offer is as good as the sense of urgency it generates,” and it happens to be true. Adding an expiration date or a countdown timer to your offers instigates a sense of urgency among the buyers. This is one of the best Holiday Marketing strategies to work upon this holiday season. Because the longer someone waits to come to a decision, the more are the chances they’ll talk themselves out of it. Not giving them a chance to deviate by placing a ticking-time-bomb in the form of a countdown timer generates the fear of missing out. All you’ll need to do is,
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- Offer a Product that’s hot and in demand.
- Create a deadline for sale to end.
- Add incentives like free shipping for the first 50 customers.
- Promote the offer to create FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) among sellers.
- Sit back and enjoy it.
#6. Encourage Thanksgiving Week buyers to buy in Christmas
The three months of festivity means people will buy again. It means we only need to work upon how to get them to buy from you again.
Encouraging the shoppers who bought from you during Halloween and Thanksgiving week to buy from you again can be easy if you know your way around it. Also, sending emails and promotional offers for Christmas shopping with discount coupons that shoppers can avail during the Christmas week is an effective way to get it done.
Conclusion
Q4 is here, and we all are pumped up about it. Buyers, for they’ll get ultimate deals. While sellers, because it gives them front row seats of the gala event, the Festive Season.
Preparations need to be done to get your plans in place when the time comes to sell. It’ll be a long three months of selling. Having a good eBay Holiday guide to Marketing Strategies that cover everything will be the key to outsell and outperform your previous years’ sales.
Integrating your store with eBay and vice versa seems to be a great idea. It will help to increase product visibility and improve sales. The selling madness that starts with Halloween will go on till Christmas.
Make sure you keep it cool and operate without any hiccups with good planning and perfect marketing strategies. Finally, have confidence and maintain that trust in yourself, for it’s the year you go jingle all the way!