Elastic pricing

Elastic pricing allows you to reduce your prices after a certain number of days with no sales and increase your prices when an item sells.

Why should I use elastic pricing?

When prices are reduced, eBay will send emails and alerts to users that are watching or have viewed your item. This will often encourage them to buy your item.

Reducing your price and getting a sale keeps your item relevant in the best match search results. Too much time with no sales can reduce your position in the best match search results.

Setting up elastic pricing

If you have a product that sells regularly, you could set the price to increase or decrease by 1% each day depending on whether it sold that day. This will make sure you are getting the most you can when your item is selling well, and trigger extra sales when it doesn't sell.

You can enable elastic pricing to work in conjunction with your competitor based repricing rules. For example, if your item hasn't sold for 7 days the price could start dropping by 1% each day until you get a sale. Then it will go back to the calculated price.

Note that Elastic Pricing will never take your item's price below your minimum price, or above your maximum price.

Enabling elastic pricing on your items

You will see an extra section now when editing an item in Price Guard.

On the "My items" page, items that have elastic pricing enabled will have elastic pricing icon next to their price.

Elastic Pricing strategy

A good starting point for deciding on Elastic Pricing strategies, is to check how regularly specific items sell. E.g. if an item typically sells once per week, you may want to drop the price more regularly than an item that sells once per month in order to maintain, or increase your sales of the item.

How much you drop your price will depend on whether you're happy to maintain your current sales rate or if you're trying to increase it.