According to the .com boards ebay has retracted the wait 14 days before putting an item on sale rule

[esclyons]

Markdown Manager Update

community_team

Community Team

07-04-2018 07:30:32 AM

In the 2018 Summer Seller Update, we announced new changes to requirements for creating a markdown sale event that went into effect on June 25, 2018. We listened to your feedback and have made a change to these markdown sale requirements. Sellers can now add items to a markdown sale event even if the listing was previously in another sale event within the past 14 days as long as the listing price has not been changed.

This is good news, but i haven't had a chance to check to see if it allows me to do it on the .ca site..

[esclyons]

In the 2018 Summer Seller Update, we announced new changes to requirements for creating a markdown sale event that went into effect on June 25, 2018. We listened to your feedback and have made a change to these markdown sale requirements. Sellers can now add items to a markdown sale event even if the listing was previously in another sale event within the past 14 days as long as the listing price has not been changed.

This is good news, but i haven't had a chance to check to see if it allows me to do it on the .ca site..

[esclyons]

new listings still have to wait 14 days, but existing older than 14 day old listings can be put into back to back sales promotions.

[hlmacdon]

It almost seems like they have realized you can't have a CEO running around saying you have significant price advantages while handicapping the ability of sellers to run promotions. 

[great_junque_finds]

I still don't see why they can't change the 14 day wait on new listings to a scenario where you can ONLY reduce the listed price by a certain % within say 7 days of newly listing. That would take care of the list for $300 immediately run a 50% off sale folks.

Personally I think all this coddling to buyers is ridiculous (even by the FTC). They're not even expected to have the slightest modicum of common sense anymore and as a buyer I'm insulted.

If you're shopping online I don't see how you can be "deceived" by pricing practices. You have the back button and price comparison shopping at your fingertips after all.

[hlmacdon]

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@great_junque_finds wrote:
If you're shopping online I don't see how you can be "deceived" by pricing practices. You have the back button and price comparison shopping at your fingertips after all.

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The Competition Bureau has already handed out million dollar fines to marketplaces for this. Inventing MSRPs and "list prices" that are fictitious or are not representative of where a product has been sold is the issue. That has implications especially where ebay is moving to a product based catalog and what that means with future changes as to how they display pricing, but more likely their main concern is insuring that buyers are actually receiving a deal as there are swaths of sellers that simply inflate a price and claim a fictitious savings. 

[great_junque_finds]

All well and good, but are they saying then that buyers have very few brain cells and can't tell the difference?

I'm so getting tired of this nanny state mentality these days. When did people stop thinking for themselves?

[femmefan1946]

People never did.

It's the principle behind 99 cent pricing.

The 'immediate markdown' scam has been around as long as I have been  an adult, and probably before that.

At one time Sears was being fined regularly for pulling that stunt. It was back in John Turner's day and the company just considered the fines a business expense.

[ricarmic]

Oh hey I guess I didn't read the rules close enough!

I regularly re-run my sales, the oldest stuff is the most discounted. I can only run a sale for 45 days I believe so I'm forced to renew them. Having to wait 14 days between would have been a pain.

I didn't have a problem with the 14 day wait on new items, to my mind it was a sneaky way to get extra visibility, ie if I want $80 for something, list it as $100 marked down 20% which gets extra visibility for it.

I know of a seller who marked everything up 20% then put it all on sale. After the sale they moved it all back to the original price. This was a few years ago.

[happy_pigeon]

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@esclyons wrote:

This is good news, but i haven't had a chance to check to see if it allows me to do it on the .ca site..

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I believe this is also going to be the case for Canada. I've been working on confirming this with Canadian PMs, and planned to make a formal announcement at that time... didn't want to jump the gun, just in case.

[happy_pigeon]

This is good news, but i haven't had a chance to check to see if it allows me to do it on the .ca site..

[hlmacdon]

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@great_junque_finds wrote:
All well and good, but are they saying then that buyers have very few brain cells and can't tell the difference?

I'm so getting tired of this nanny state mentality these days. When did people stop thinking for themselves?

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That is exactly what they are saying. The general public is at best aware of pricing in general terms and in general couldn't really tell you what the regular/list/MSRP price of an item is supposed to be. They aren't retailers, they aren't sales people, they aren't buyers/product managers. Perceived savings play a big role in the purchase decision. Having worked for 20+ years in retail/ecom at the national level these are things that get drilled into you, when you can put things on sale, what savings you can claim, etc. If that goes out the window then you might as well be selling used cars or selling speakers out of the back of a cargo van. Some ground rules are necessary as otherwise abuse becomes rampant and buyers get turned off. I mean really, how many times do you pull over and stop when you see a going out of business, massive discounts roadside sign for a furniture store?

The regulatory bodies have traditionally been more concerned with brick and mortar and printed advertising, but that landscape is shifting as the fines the likes of Amazon have been slapped with demonstrate. It's an area I've actually had discussions with people from the Competition Bureau on. They are trying to strike a balance between the public's desire for discounting and treat ecommerce much more gently than brick and mortar but are concerned with bad practices from some of the larger players in the marketplace. If anything they are taking a very light approach.

[esclyons]

i totally understand if you are selling the exact new retail  thing in the exact retail box, then i can  expect to see where they are going with this.. Same fit for the price guarantee, but for anyone who sells items that don't fall into that category they should be exempt from that 14 day rule.. For coins, stamps, collectibles etc, there can't be a set price.. 

so where i start my price is not important, it is where the buyer and i agree on a price that matters.. 

So ebay please back out, and stop sticking your nose into matters that shouldn't concern you, or be white-washed with a single brush stroke,,

[hlmacdon]

@esclyons wrote:

i totally understand if you are selling the exact new retail  thing in the exact retail box, then i can  expect to see where they are going with this.. Same fit for the price guarantee, but for anyone who sells items that don't fall into that category they should be exempt from that 14 day rule.. For coins, stamps, collectibles etc, there can't be a set price.. 

so where i start my price is not important, it is where the buyer and i agree on a price that matters.. 

 So ebay please back out, and stop sticking your nose into matters that shouldn't concern you, or be white-washed with a single brush stroke,, 

I totally get what you are saying with respect to OOAK items, used items, collectibles, etc in that there may be no easy way to determine what the established price is. That being said the majority of the merchandise sold on ebay is new in box items.  If being able to discount from the start of a listing is important it sounds like the best compromise is to use best offer instead. I think sellers could use better tools to manage inventory and pricing here, but a 14 day wait time before trying to claim a discount/savings is not that unreasonable. The previous requirement for a cooling off time between sales was more limiting and the bigger problem, especially for sellers with a large number of listings that turn very infrequently. 

Having at least some price integrity that can't be gamed by launching hundreds of new listings with fictitious discounting is critical if ebay are going to do things like implement discount filters which would be far more effective than the current largely useless "deals & savings" filter and the terribly implemented "trending at" price indicator. If you don't control these things carefully the customers who matter (frequent repeat buyers) lose confidence in discounting and it becomes less effective as a means of increasing conversion. If searching for Widget ABC123 results in 1000 "sale priced" listings with 950 of those claiming 50% off or greater savings it becomes totally ineffective. 

It's going to be a tough few years ahead for the collectibles/OOAK type seller as a lot of what ebay is shaping up to do is a square peg round hole scenario for anyone not selling traditional boxed products with MPNs. 

[retroman_studios]

In my area there used to be a store called XS Cargo, very shady. They were an IKEA/Jysk/Visions sorta thing that sold so many products with very poor policies that just barely satisfied the legal requirements. When boxing day arrived, if you flipped up the pink/neon sign that advertised the boxing day price, you found it was the same as regular price or in some cases.....more.

So it's 50/50. Yes folks are dumb, but you also need to discourage businesses from being shady to a degree.