Do you find having a sale % off helps with sales?

[musicyouneed]

Do you find having a sale 10% to 15% off helps with sales?   For the most part for me I don't find too much of a difference in sales but really wanted to hear what others have to say?

[esclyons]

some times, i see a small bump, but in totality not worth it, because i sell pretty much everything with buy-it-now or best offer,  if i put items on sale with 10% off, then i get buyers, low balling me..

I will still put items on sale but i am less flexible with the buy-it-now offers..

I believe buyers who are watching your items will get a notification that the item they are watching just went down in price.. But if they don't bite in the first 24 hours they aren't likely to do so a week later..

I have never tried a 24-48 hour mark down, perhaps i will next time,  perhaps if a potential buyer see's that the discount is only good for a day or two, they may jump at that..

[reallynicestamps]

DH is convinced that having a price reduction is telling your customers that your product is not worth what you were charging for it.

Full disclosure- This is B&M selling, not online. And our product was not subject to seasonality.

He found that when he had a price reduction his number of sales did not increase, but the money coming in decreased.

Again- no real seasonality in our product (stamps for collectors) but we have a huge dropoff every Christmas season. Every. Single. Year.

Because our collectors turned their "stamp allowance" into family gifts.

So what he did was, starting Boxing Day, he would hand out trade dollars (think Canadian Tire money) for post-Christmas purchases. The value of the trade dollars was equal to ON sales tax, although he tried a few other promotions.
He found this tremendously popular. Sales and income went up. Collectors hoarded the trade dollars and used them throughout the year.

Later he turned them into gift certificates and used them as "discounts without a discount" on purchases over $100- usually equal to sales taxes.

Side benefit- regular customers got discounts. Walk-ins didn't. Rewarding the most useful customer.

We've never really worked out a way to transfer this to online shopping.

If the product is seasonal, discounts after the season are more feasible.

[ricarmic]

I'm cramped for time so this is a coles notes version:

I did a lot of experiments with sales % off. Maybe a tiny burst of sales, a bit of a jump in views etc. But no big winner.

I am currently experimenting with "volume purchases" they seem to have some positive effect. I put 1,000 of my $15 and under items all in the programmes, trying to get people to pool purchase of smaller stuff which has inordinately high individual shipping costs (I'm a free shipping kinda guy). 

By very far and very wide the very best thing I've done maybe ever here in the last 20 years was use the 1% promoted listings.....that really boosts views and sales. Much better than a higher % over a smaller number of items. Sadly though this might only work for me because I list in 100s of categories so my 1% shows higher in a number of them at any time than the "trending" rate.