About Rarewaves
Rarewaves was started in 2005 to sell music and DVDs on marketplaces such as eBay. It has grown to a multi-national company with offices in the UK, USA and Australia. They have served over 40 million customers across over 200 countries since launch2.
Music and DVD remain an important part of the business with over 1 million vinyl albums sold in 20222.
With more than 1.2m product listings live on eBay across a diverse range of categories – including Collectables, Cycling, Books, Fashion and Tech – Rarewaves distributes goods from both the UK and US to the world.
Following successful trials of both general and priority strategies for Promoted Listings, Rarewaves now promotes all their listings with a general campaign strategy on an always-on basis.
Campaign objectives
Having enjoyed a boost to sales when using eBay seller coupons and Promoted Listings separately, Rarewaves was keen to determine if it could drive incremental sales velocity by deploying both seller marketing tools simultaneously.
The campaign was scheduled to run on ebay.co.uk for five days to tap into a retail opportunity identified through shopper insights available to all eBay sellers through the Seller Dashboard.
Campaign strategy
Rarewaves had three aims for this campaign:
- Promote listings with a general campaign strategy in combination with an eBay seller coupon to increase exposure and sell-through across all of its 1 million+ eBay listings
- Determine which categories performed best for the combination of general campaigns and an eBay seller coupon
- Determine if there was scope to repeat the promotion of promoting their listings with a general campaign strategy and an eBay seller coupon in combination
A coupon offering buyers 15% off all purchases from the Rarewaves eBay shop ran from 03–07 Feb 2023. Promoted Listings with a general campaign strategy was set up as an always-on campaign with ad rates optimised for each product sub-category. The campaign was optimised in real-time by adjusting the ad rate of the general campaigns based on the volume of impressions, clicks and sales.
Campaign results
Benchmarks for the campaign were generated using the five-day period immediately before the combination of promoting listings with a general campaign strategy and the eBay seller coupon were applied. During the benchmark period, Rarewaves was running only general campaigns.
The combination of Promoted Listings with a general campaign strategy and the eBay seller coupon resulted in 74 million impressions for Rarewaves’ listings being generated and clicks on the seller’s promoted listings grew by 15%1.
Overall, the campaign resulted in a return on ad spend of 39:1 for the five-day period1.
At Rarewaves we’re proud to have built our business on eBay since we sold our first item (a rare piece of U2 memorabilia) in 2005.
We now sell tens of thousands of items every day on eBay and we’re keen to use all the tools available to us to increase that.Promoted Listings with a general campaign strategy is an important part of our marketing mix on eBay, generating impressions at the top of the funnel and eBay seller coupons are a fantastic tool to rapidly grow conversion.
Through the tactical deployment of eBay seller coupons and continuing our usage of general campaign strategy, these two levers work in harmony to meaningfully deliver incremental sales.
Alastair Burge, Director of Marketplaces, Rarewaves.com Limited
*This success story has been updated to reflect the product name changes.
Sources
- 1 eBay data. For the comparison of impressions, clicks and sales velocity, the Promoted Listings Standard / eBay seller coupon campaign period is defined as 03-07 Feb 2023 and the pre-campaign period when just Promoted Listings Standard was running is from 27-31 Jan 2023. Results may not be typical and will vary among sellers.
- 2 Rarewaves internal data, 2023.
