How To Get eBay Daily Deals

How To Get on eBay Daily Deals

How To Get on eBay Daily Deals” and its deviations appear to be a common question that are driving people here, but I’ve never actually answered the question directly, only indicated in an earlier article that you can create your own using the eBay shops tags in the article called How to Make Your Own eBay Daily Deals & Weekly Deals.

In this article, I cover the ground around daily deals and try and be constructive as possible around helping you try and obtain a daily deal on eBay.

What Are eBay Daily Deals?

Today OnlyeBay daily deals have been around for a number of years now, there was a slight pause in these just before Christmas 2010 and they’ve been on the site since their re-introduction.

They’re focused towards amazing deals on products that also have a depth and desirability towards eBay users, whether you like it or not, most top spots are taken by larger outlet sellers who can deal with large volumes of transactions and have the inventory depth & buying power to deliver such deals.

Typically there are only two deals per day and are subsidised by weekly deals, that last funnily enough for a week. This is an important note to make, when we get to the pivotal question later, there are daily and weekly deals. One of these formats can be more productive than the other and it’s not the one you immediately suspect.

When we look at some of the recent daily deals further on in this article, you’ll notice that some of the numbers are quite attractive, to give you a wider picture, the volume of sales created by eBay are often dwarfed by that of sites that are wholly dedicated to daily deals, such as Groupon and LivingSocial.

Over 170 SoldCurious question, as what’s been featured in an eBay daily deal has been varied to say the least. From bikes to shorts, wellies to TV’s, XBOX’s to perfumes, it’s all been on a daily deal.

It’s not very well known, but there is an RSS feed of the eBay daily deals that can be found here: http://deals.ebay.co.uk/DailyDeal.rss this feed is very handy, especially if you keep track of it in a RSS reader such as Google Reader, as it’ll keep a history all the deals, so you can go back over them and see what’s sold and what’s not.

Note: Its not unknown that several companies keep track of the daily deals on a daily basis to leverage the sales information that they find through this channel and for other reasons.

Looking at the last couple of daily deals, there have been some real flops and some winners. I’ve put these into a table to make displaying the data a little easier on the eye.

Recent eBay Daily Deals

eBay Title Value # Sold Total
DGM ETV-2493WHC 24″ Ultra Thin LED TV DVD FULL HD 1080p USB PVR Freeview  £139.99  461 £64,535.39
E4 MENS STONE ROCK AND REVIVAL DESIGNER DROP CROTCH CHINOS ALL SIZES UK RRP £55
(2 Listings)
 £17.99 288 +
207
£8,905.05
Women’s Nike Revolutionary Support Sports Bra 226015 ***3 Colors Available***  £7.99 3312 £26,462.88
Smith & Jones Marques Hoody
(6 listings)
 £14.99 624 + 427 + 370 + 284 + 242 + 232 £32,663.21
Kylie Minogue Sweet Darling Eau de Toilette Spray 15ml  £6.99  95 £664.05
South Double Breasted Duffle Coat In Mustard  £9.99  184 £1,838.16
BUSBI BOLT 32GB USB 3.0 SILVER MEMORY STICK FLASH PEN KEY DRIVE HIGH SPEED NEW  £24.99  18 £449.82
Xbox 360 250GB Console – Matte Black Finish  £179.99  418 £75,235.82
Fujitsu AH530 15.6″ Intel Pentium Win7 Laptop  £299.96  970 £290,961.2
Intempo Retro DAB/FM Radio with iPod/iPhone Dock in  £44.99  91 £4,229.06
Christmas Bumper Collection Book Pack – x6 Childrens Christmas Books  £8.99  44 £395.56
G-Star Raw Laundry Shooting Jacket  £39.99 143 £5,718.57
French Vintage Rustic Kitchen Set – Mug Mugs Chopping Board Magnets Shabby Chic  £9.99  48 £479.52
HIGH QUALITY EASY STORAGE BAMBOO CHOPPING BOARD WITH INTEGRATED PESTLE & MORTAR  £11.99  34 £407.66
HALO COMBAT EVOLVED ANNIVERSARY XBOX 360 MICROSOFT VIDEO GAME NEW SEALED PAL  £25.85  225 £5,816.25

As you can see its been a real mixed bag, the chopping boards were a complete flop, along with a few others, however in transactional volume, the laptops came out on tops with close to £300,000 of sales in a day or so.

This is the general theme of eBay daily deals, they tend to either flop or do “OK”, however there are always a few exceptions and when they do go, they will go deep in either the value or number of transactions (like the laptop’s v’s the bra’s).

The Issues With Daily Deals (as a Merchant)

The transactional volume of sales is an issue, as the volume of orders that a daily deal has been proven to produce and with the deal sporting an uncertain outcome.

Take the bra’s for example, that’s over 3,000 pairs to get out, ideally in under a day and that kind of spike can wreak havoc in a business if they’re not prepared (and even if they are!).

Daily deals don’t happen overnight, they’re scheduled with plenty of time lag to prepare for them and of course there is a negotiation period between the merchant and eBay. Even still the companies that I’ve worked with that have had both daily and weekly deals, have in some cases still struggled with the volume of orders that such offers can produce.

Preparation is key, the obvious one is packing as many lines as products as possible before hand, the second not so obvious is having a tool that can cope with a potential large volume of orders and of course the custom service requirement, as you know full well, this is eBay and for every sale, you’re likely to get at least one question ;-)

How Can You Get an eBay Daily Deal?

So we’re finally at the pivotal question “How Can You Get an eBay Daily Deal?” and sadly the answer is not straightforward.

Looking from side of eBay you’re going to have to check a few boxes, these could be:

  • Proven sales history on eBay
    You’ve got a long history of selling on eBay and that you’re capable of dealing with the style of buyers found on eBay (demanding).
  • Ideally at Strategic or Enterprise account status
    eBay Outlets tend to fall into the “Enterprise” bracket of account management, however there is a layer below this level and you’d be surprised at the number of eBay businesses that are covered by these account management levels. Instead of one account manager to several hundred accounts, we’re talking one account manager to less than 10 accounts. Now that’s some focus ;-)
  • Be sat on or have access to a product or range of products that can be offered an unbelievable value
    Its not unheard of for multiple offers for daily or weekly deals to be rejected, this is actually the hardest step to get through as the eBay daily deals staff are exceptionally picky in what makes it through to the final deals that are shown on the site.
  • Have the ability to process a very large spike in sales volume logistically
    Having back-end software tools that can cope with “volume” are almost absolutely required. While some merchants have used SMP (Selling Manager Pro) successfully, dealing with such volumes with this kind of tool isn’t really going to stand up to the job. Instead, if I was sat in the place of the person(s) that are calling which eBay daily deals to let through and which ones to not, I’d probably choose a slightly more uncompetitive one where the merchant has software that can cope with huge volumes and staff & processes in place to deal with them, over another merchant that I’d have doubts in.

Also an interesting dynamic that you may have not considered is that eBay account managers are likely to have sales targets to hit, this is an entry point you may not have considered as with just a few or even just one daily deal “in the bag” for them, could easily allow them to reach those targets and thus provide a motivation point for you to explore.

Now before you even consider hitting the ‘contact Matt’ page and asking whom to approach, the response you’re likely to get back isn’t likely to be particularly constructive. Instead, think about what internal channels you can leverage, such as the eBay account manager route and also what external channels such as LinkedIn to locate the people you need to contact.

Summary

In this article, I’ve covered what eBay daily deals are, what kind of volumes in both sales and item counts you can expect and perspectives you’ve probably not considered and this article should at least make you think of a couple of action points:

  • How can your business deal with +3000 in a single day
  • How can your business create a deal that is of exceptional value to eBay customers
  • How can you make your business & offers attractive to eBay

Now with that said, you should ignore daily deals, the deals you want to go for are eBay’s Weekly Deals and I explain these in one of my next articles.

9 replies
  1. Trevor Wood
    Trevor Wood says:

    I use KGB, Groupon and Money Supermarket to promote the occassional deal – i would also like to use Ebay – but so far I am getting frustrated in my attempts to call the daily or weekly deals team to explore the possible – can someone please give me a contact name and number to call?

    Many thanks
    Trevor Wood
    Managing Director

    Reply
  2. John Smith
    John Smith says:

    Also ebay will only give you a position if you can generate a certain amount of revenue, for clothing they prefer variation listings and plain simple styles that customers can mix and match with. Electronics have a higher price point and so they are less reliant on volume of sales to hit that target which is why you see so many laptops, hdtv’s etc.

    The other deal slots also have targets allotted to them and you ebay account manager will be able to tell you these.

    Reply
  3. Dave Furness
    Dave Furness says:

    Another good article Matt. A quick point which probably wont affect many of your readers but figured I would drop it in here is that your Daily Deals have to be Brand New products. For this reason we are often to be found in the Weekly Deals Refurb category (Currently been replaced by Fragrances or Home etc)

    To be fair to Weekly deals though we see a fantastic increases in sales (Usually) on Weekly deals and I have my own story on a particular product which flew out…but i’ll save that for another article.

    Dave

    Reply

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