Markdown sale events

You can list up to 10,000 items in your markdown campaigns.

Unlike “order discounts,” where the discount isn't applied until checkout, markdown discounts revise the item to reduce the price. When you mark down an item (e.g. 20%), the item’s price on eBay reflects the markdown, and the discount will be applied at checkout. When your sale ends, we will mark your items back up to their pre-markdown prices, which may take several hours.

Buyers will see a special Strike-Through Price treatment in the following places:

• Item page (plus free shipping, if offered)
• Search results
• Checkout page
• In all other areas, the sale price will be displayed as the Buy It Now price (including in the main eBay search results)

No. This selection does not affect the items included in the offer; it only determines how the offer is worded for the buyer. Items will be included in the sale event regardless of the size of the discount. The criteria for inclusion in a sale event are:

• Items must have Strike-Through Pricing (STP), or percentage or dollar discounts
• Items must meet the inclusion/exclusion rules selected or be included in the selected SKUs or Item IDs

No. Sale events are merchandising opportunities for already discounted items. A sale event only created through Seller Hub Promotions does not apply an additional discount. If you want to apply a % discount to a set of items, use the discount + sale event section.

There is currently no way to change the order. The order is determined based on sales over impressions, so the best performers get the prime placements.

Large inventory sets: If an offer is a storewide offer or maps to multiple categories, Seller Hub Promotions fetches the other items in the offer for the same category and then displays the item based on popularity (impressions / sales).

Small inventory sets: If the number of eligible items is less than 500, Seller Hub Promotions grabs all of the eligible items and displays based on popularity, e.g. (sales / impressions).

We recommend sellers to break out promotional offers into logical inventory groups that people would tend to shop as a whole. The promotions team is working on improving this functionality.

The minimum requirements for qualification in a special offer are: 

• Strike-Through Pricing (STP) pricing treatment is required for sale events only
• Items must have a Buy It Now option. No Auction types are supported. Best Offer type with a Buy It Now component is supported, but discounts will only be applied if a purchase is made through Buy It Now. Once the buyer has made a “best offer bid” and that bid is accepted, the item is no longer eligible for other promotion offers. 
• When entering or selecting SKUs for SKU based offers, multi-variation (color, size, style, etc.) items/listings must include the parent SKU ID to be eligible for the offer. Child variation IDs do not need to be added and will automatically be fetched per the parent SKU ID. If only the child SKU ID is included in the offer, this item will be ignored. 
• Items with a Minimum Advertised Price, or MAP, treatment (item price is not displayed because it is below the Minimum Advertised Price) are not supported.

SKU stands for Stock-Keeping Unit, which is a general term for a catalog number for a specific item. SKU is also called “Custom Label” in eBay’s selling tools, such as Selling Manager, Selling Manager Pro, the bulk edit and revise tool in My eBay, and API. 

A SKU number can refer to a number generated by the manufacturer, or it can be a number that a seller creates for each item to manage their inventory. The SKU number for an item is provided by the seller when an item is listed or after it has been listed. Using SKUs or custom labels make it easier for you to re-list products with the same SKUs or custom labels, without having to also configure cross-sales for them each time. 

You can add or edit SKU numbers in the “Custom Label” field of your listings using Selling Manager, Selling Manager Pro, the bulk edit and revise tool in My eBay, and API. Learn more about these eBay selling tools.

There’s no “silver bullet” for getting a good position in search. Creating and promoting promotions on eBay will not directly give you an advantage in your listings’ search results rank; however, sales of all items with a special offer will count as a sale for each item’s listing. As a result, the listing will automatically move up in rank in Best Match over time as sale is taken into account in the Best Match algorithm. More importantly, by creating offers you are funneling buyers from search to shop your items alone.

Yes. Multiple offers may apply to a given item or sets of inventory however, the buyer will only see one offer message displayed at a time. If the same item is in more than one promotion please reference the promotions display logic to see which promotion will be given the priority.

In order to enhance the relevance of cross-sold items that are displayed on the item page, the eBay promotions tool will use an algorithm based on item price, shipping price, and quantity sold to determine the order in which your configured items are displayed. If your items are new and do not have sales history on eBay, the promotions tool will use the order in which you provided the SKUs to determine the display position.

You can add a SKU to your offer even if you have not yet listed any item on eBay with that particular SKU. However, this SKU will essentially be ignored until an item with this SKU can be found for display with the offer.

You can list up to 500 SKUs with each Order Offer. The limitation is in scope for the future roadmap.

If you have more than 500 SKUs for the promotion the best practice is to select items by store category. You can also create a second store category for items to be placed in a promotion. If you cannot create new store categories, you will need to separate the items into different order size promotions.

Shipping discount offers may be applied on top of all other discount offers. The shipping discount threshold is evaluated after all other discounts have been applied.

No. This selection does not affect the items included in the offer; it only determines how the offer is worded for the buyer. Items will be included in the sale event regardless of the size of the discount. The criteria for inclusion in a sale event are: 

• Items must have Strike-Through Pricing (STP) treatment
• Items must meet the inclusion/exclusion rules selected or be included in the selected SKUs or Item IDs

No. Sale events are merchandising opportunities for already discounted items. A sale event created through Seller Hub Promotions does not apply an additional discount. If you want to apply a % discount to a set of items, you can create an order discount with a minimum quantity threshold of 1 item.

Most edits to your listings will appear immediately on your live offers. In the case where you change a listing to offer free shipping in order to qualify for an Accessory Discount offer, it may take up to 4 hours before the listing will appear with your live offer.

You can edit inventory rules and the list of SKUs selected for your offer at any time. Remember, you must have at least one SKU listed within your offer for it to be active.

Yes, Seller Hub Promotions allows you to set offers to activate at a future date/time and specify the date/time when the offer should automatically deactivate. Once an offer is live you can also edit it, put it on hold, or end it prior to the specified end date.

The eBay tool for creating and managing promotions does not currently support the ability to schedule offers to be held or reactivated at a specific time. When you choose to place an offer on hold or resume an offer, it will take effect within 15 minutes.

You can exclude up to 100 SKUs from a promotion on an item-by-item basis or by exclusion rule using eBay or seller store category. This can be done as part of Step 2 of offer creation, “Choose qualifying items for your offer.” You would select “Create exclusion rule.”