eBay offers a clearance feature called eBay Easy Pricing, and it got some attention when a seller called in to a recent eBay for Business podcast to ask about it. The caller said he saw the prompt for Easy Pricing when listing an item on his phone. “I do not recall getting this prompt on my desktop,” he said.
The host of the eBay for Business podcast, Jim Griffith (Griff), confirmed it was only available when listing items on the mobile app and said, “if you refuse to use it, after a while, the prompt seems to disappear.”
eBay Easy Pricing launched in 2018 (you can see a sample screenshot in this post from 2020). It’s basically an automatic discounting feature – here’s how eBay explained it to sellers who encountered Easy Pricing at the time: “Starting 10 days after listing, we’ll lower the price (5% every 5 days) until your item sells or gets to $xx.xx. We’ll notify buyers who showed interest each time the price drops. Turn it off anytime by going to your listing.”
As we had reported, some sellers feared it would deter shoppers from making purchases, choosing instead to wait for prices to drop, and also noting it was designed to pressure sellers to lower prices.
In answering the question during the podcast, Griffith said he checked in with the eBay Product Team. “It’s something that is meant for the new or occasional seller to reconsider their price automatically,” he said, adding that any seller who sees it can use it for any fixed price item.
Griffith also addressed other questions from listeners of the podcast, including one about eBay’s removal of the Visual Search feature from the mobile app. According to the eBay-provided transcript of the podcast, Griffith said:
“I contacted at our Product Team and they informed me that because of some inconsistencies that popped up with the feature at the end of December, they had temporarily removed it from the app and they had to do it quickly because they didn’t want these inconsistencies to keep showing up, but they’re working to get it back, fixed ASAP. So that version of the Visual Search, they should have it back up and running very soon.
“But he also told me that they actually planned to relaunch a new and improved version of Visual Search later this year in 2022. So stay tuned for that. And yes, it did work really well and it worked a lot better than Google’s.”
You can listen to the podcast (or read the full transcript) on this page of the eBay website.
