eBay Sellers Can Now Offer Tiered Volume Discounts

eBay added a new feature to Promotions Manager so sellers can give shoppers an incentive to buy in quantity. By adding tiers to the Volume Price Discount feature, sellers can now offer buyers greater discounts for purchasing greater quantities.

Here's how eBay describes the new functionality:

"Volume price discounts, give tiered discounts to buyers purchasing multiple quantities of your items. The improved item page treatment makes it easier for buyers to buy in bulk, so you save on shipping."

In a sample screenshot, eBay showed how the new feature will appear to buyers, labeling it "Bulk savings" on the listing page. 

The sample listing shows shoppers they can buy 1 at $5.99/ea, buy 2 at $5.39/ea, buy 3 at $5.09/ea, or buy 4 or more for $4.79/ea.

Sellers discussed the new feature in a thread on the eBay discussion boards, where a moderator answered questions.

Sellers can't offer shoppers the ability to mix and match, however - in other words, if they want to buy 10 items to get a bulk purchase discount, it has to be 10 identical items - variations are excluded. 

The eBay moderator spelled out this limitation as follows:

"The Volume Discount tool does not support variation listings at this time. We are looking into the possibility of adding support for variation listings in the future.

"Discounts currently work per item only, meaning that volume discounts do not work across different items/SKUs."

You can see from the screenshot below that the feature is integrated into the listing, which makes it especially attractive since eBay stopped showing promotions at the top of listings for many sellers. However, it only works for sellers who have large numbers of identical products.

As is often the case, thanks to an alert reader for the news tip.