Seasonal tips: practical tools for the peak sales season

• Plan your promotion strategy
• Connect with your audience using social media
• Promote your listings to improve visibility
• Offer bargain prices
• Bring back past customers
• Delegate routine tasks
• Make your listings mobile-friendly
• Optimize your listings and Store for holiday rush
• Offer free shipping (and free returns if possible)
• Keep selling after Black Friday and Christmas

During the peak season, 71% of consumers start their holiday shopping online, and eBay is among the top three destinations for them [1]. Buyers are expecting bargain prices and big discounts starting from Black Friday, and they are ready to splurge despite tightening budgets. Sales usually skyrocket during this period, comprising about 40% of annual revenue, but the peak season has its challenges [2]. Sellers need to attract buyers without dropping your prices too low and reach more shoppers despite fierce competition. This guide is meant to equip you with practical tools and help you make it through the Christmas season with maximum profit.

Plan your promotion strategy

To make the most profit out of the peak season, you need to work out a promotion strategy that will help you attract and hold buyers’ attention. Here are the key insights that will help you:

• 79% of eBay shoppers spend a lot of time exploring their purchase options [1]
• 32% of buyers are "early birds" who do their holiday shopping in advance [3]
• 28% are "last-minute shoppers" who prefer to take their time until they can better understand their holiday budget [3]
• 35% are going to "distribute the load" and spread Christmas shopping across several last months of the year [3]

The takeaway

Given the buyers’ preferences, you should run a long-term promotion campaign starting long before Black Friday. Buyers need time to notice your items, do some research on the Internet, and finally make the purchase decision. We recommend using several marketing channels to maximize your reach: eBay Advertising, social media, Store newsletters, Sale events.

Read more about creating a successful promotional strategy

Connect with your audience using social media

For many shoppers, social media plays an important role in their holiday shopping. They seek inspiration for home decor, look for gift ideas, read product reviews and user comments, follow retailers’ pages to learn about upcoming sales events. Last year, 56% of millennials and 60% of Gen Z shoppers planned to use social media for holiday shopping, and this year this share is likely to grow [4].

It’s time to use your social accounts to drive traffic to your eBay listings! Create social media accounts using your eBay username or store name. Link them to your eBay account and create posts quickly using the Social page of Seller Hub. It’s your quickest way to share listings to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and other platforms. And don’t forget to encourage your buyers to follow you on social media.

To increase the impact of your social media accounts:

• Post actively and showcase your items. Add quality photos with seasonal props or backgrounds to create festive vibes. Upload compelling videos with your items in use
• Give value to your followers. Offer them useful advice and demonstrate expertise in the area
• Share buyers’ positive comments (screenshots from eBay feedback or My Messages)
• Hashtag the brands you’re selling. Add trending hashtags to your posts to be discovered by those who aren’t your followers. Use phrases like “Black Friday”, “Cyber Monday”, “gift guide”, “Xmas gift ideas” and such
• Post behind-the-scenes videos in your stories or TikTok
• Consider launching targeted ad campaigns on social media

Read more about connecting with buyers on social media

Promote your listings to improve visibility

During the peak season, buyers rely on sellers to inspire them and help them find the right gifts. eBay Advertising will help you drive visibility and grow your market share.

You can set up three different types of advertising campaigns:

• Promote your listings — Drive sales by putting your listings in front of relevant buyers with access to ad placements
• Promote your store — Attract interested buyers to your store with targeted ads showcasing your top inventory
• Promote offsite — Highlight your eligible listings on popular external channels, like Google

You can promote your listings from the Advertising tab in Seller Hub. After creating a new campaign for promoting your listings, you’ll choose a campaign strategy to fit your unique business needs:

• The general strategy can increase the visibility and awareness of your listings with general access to ad placements so you can reach more buyers. You’ll only pay when your item sells through a click on your ad. 
• The priority strategy helps your listings reach highly motivated buyers with priority access ad placements and advanced targeting controls. You’ll only pay when someone clicks on your ads.

The purchasing impact of eBay ads is supported by data:

The takeaway

Plan a long-term ad strategy across the entire holiday season. Customers looking for items like yours will see your listings at every step of their eBay purchase journey. Whether it be at the beginning, in the middle, or at the very end of the Christmas season.

If you've never used eBay Advertising before, read the overview article to find out which ad type is best for your business needs: Promoted Listings, Promoted Stores, or Promoted Offsite.

Offer bargain prices

Holiday shoppers are mostly bargain hunters who want to get the most value for their money. Both “early birds” and “last-minute shoppers” scour the marketplace, looking for the biggest discounts they can find. To attract holiday shoppers to your listings, price competitively and offer all kinds of discounts.

How to attract bargain hunters:

• Use Discounts Manager to set up volume discounts, Sale Events, shipping discounts, and size discounts. Holiday shoppers will be more likely to purchase more of your items and increase your average order value
• Send Offers to buyers with lower prices than those stated in your listings. This feature is useful if you want to reach buyers already interested in your items. Offers can be sent in bulk to everyone who has added your Fixed price item to their watching list or shopping cart during the previous five days
• Use Store newsletters to inform buyers about the upcoming sales and discounts. If they get such a notice in advance, they may decide to put your items on their shopping lists

Create and send Coded coupons to attract new buyers or encourage repeat customers. Coupons can be shared via social media, Store newsletters, ad campaigns or other marketing channels. You can also print coupons and add them to boxes when shipping orders. Create a coupon now

Delegate routine tasks

Hopefully, you will get a lot more orders during the Christmas season. If you’re running your eBay business alone, you might feel stressed and overwhelmed — especially if you struggle to meet your handling time.

To get through the peak season with maximum efficiency, consider hiring an assistant and delegating specific workflows such as listing creation and editing, incoming orders review, generation of reports and such. eBay multi-user account access allows you to do it without exposing your password or sensitive business information.

The takeaway

Use multi-user account access to delegate routine workflows to designated users. You will have more time to focus on business development and other strategic tasks.

Make your listings mobile-friendly

In Q2 2023, eBay buyers purchased items worth $11.6B using their mobile devices [7]. It’s about 64% of the total GMV of this period! With the growing number of mobile shoppers, it’s crucial to optimize your listings for smartphones and tablets:

• Use legible font and simple formatting
• Avoid horizontal scrolling
• Use bullet points in the description
• Make sure all description elements scale across device sizes
• Use the eBay photo uploader instead of adding images to the description
• Don't use active content, including JavaScript, Flash and form actions
• Add shipping, payment and returns info to the corresponding fields

Please keep in mind that item descriptions aren’t displayed in full on mobile devices. Users see only a short summary that can be expanded on click. That’s why it’s so important to add key information about shipping, payment and returns to the listing fields instead of jamming everything into your descriptions.

Read more about mobile optimization

Optimize your listings and Store for holiday rush

Visibility is key during the peak season. To make your items appear more often in buyers’ search results, optimize your listings according to our recommendations. You may achieve a significant increase in traffic without spending a dime!

How to make your items more visible for potential buyers:

• Add top-searched seasonal keywords and phrases to listings’ titles and descriptions. Try “Christmas gift”, “Christmas decor”, “Black Friday sale”, “Cyber Monday Sale”, “Christmas gift for husband”, or whatever is relevant. It will increase your items’ visibility in search results

• Write clear and structured descriptions that include the information buyers may need. Brand names, sizes, model numbers, key characteristics, etc
• Add product identifiers if there are any (GTIN, UPC, EAN, MPN, etc.). They make it easier for buyers to find your listings both on eBay and through external search engines

• Add item photos and videos with seasonal props and holiday-themed backgrounds. They will inspire potential customers, motivate them to view your listings and make a purchase

• Add relevant item specifics. They depend on what you’re selling and may include brand, size, length, width, height, type, color, style, etc. The more details you add, the more visibility your item will get
• Check if your items are listed in the correct category. If not, your listings will be less visible for shoppers (and violate the eBay policy as well)

Read more about listing optimization

Offer free shipping (and free returns if possible)

Black Friday and Cyber Monday shoppers usually expect free shipping. They often filter their search results on eBay so as to see only listings with this option. It means that a more expensive item with free shipping is likely to get more visibility and more sales than an identical product with a lower price.

Free returns are also a good option that helps eliminate buyers’ doubt. If you sell worldwide, set up your return preferences to offer free returns in closer regions only (so that your bottom line would not get severely affected). No returns at all will put off potential customers, and they will look for the desired items elsewhere.

To learn more about shipping tips and best practices, read our article on holiday season shipping.

Keep selling after Black Friday and Christmas

The holiday season isn’t over with Black Friday and Cyber Monday. A lot of buyers will be looking for Christmas gifts for the most part of December. Follow these recommendations to make the most out of pre-Christmas sales:

• Keep track of your sales. Use Product Research to find out what products in your category are selling, analyze price dynamics and spikes of interest
• Manage inventory. Regularly check if you have enough merchandise in stock, so that you won’t run out of best-selling items
• Tweak your listings. If buyers are choosing competitors’ products over yours, add more details about your items, upload quality photos or review prices

After Christmas

Sales often drop when everyone is getting their rest from the shopping spree. If you prefer to relax as well, set Time Away and enjoy your vacation. But for many buyers, it’s time to spend money they’ve got as Christmas gifts. Here’s how you can attract their attention:

• Target repeat customers, offering them special post-Christmas deals in Store newsletters
• Announce a clearance sale with big discounts on old inventory
• Start a fun contest on social media to encourage buyers to show their Christmas purchases. This contest will promote your products and generate excitement
• Start selling a new line of products in the new year
• Cater for “New Year resolutions”: offer sports clothes and gear, healthy food, planners, diet supplementaries, personal care products, etc. Use Product Research to see what sells best during this slow period

To learn more about consumer behavior and sentiment trends regarding gift shopping and holiday spending, read our articles about Black Friday and Christmas. Good luck with your sales during the peak season!