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Preparing for the May Bank Holidays
In May, the UK will celebrate three bank holidays on Monday 1 May, Monday 8 May and Monday 29 May 2023.
Here are some tips to help you prepare:
Schedule time away
If you’re planning a well-earned break over a bank holiday weekend and won't be able to process your sales as normal, you can schedule some time away. Here's how to schedule your time away if needed:
- Go to your Time Away settings
- Select Schedule time away.
- Select Allow item sales or Pause item sales while on time away.
- Set a Start date and End date for your time away. To start your time away immediately, select today's date.
- Select Apply.
You can also set an automatic response for buyers who contact you through eBay Messages while you're away. Please note that turning on Time Away settings won't change dispatch dates or estimated delivery dates (EDDs) for items where:
- Items had been ordered before the setting activated
- An offer had already been sent by you or the buyer before the setting activated
- For auctions which had already started before the setting activated
It’s worth checking your settings in advance to make sure your auction listings won’t end while you’re away (read more about scheduling listings and automatically relisting items) and check if you’ve set your listings to automatically send offers to buyers. And even though this might sound obvious, remember not to send offers to buyers manually just before taking time away!
Estimated delivery dates
The May bank holidays won’t be included as dispatch dates or shown as estimated delivery dates (EDDs) on eBay.co.uk.
As some of you are relatively new to selling on eBay, this recent article answers some of the most frequently asked questions about EDDs and delivery-related defects.
Bank holiday sales and promotions
Finally, many online retailers run sales and promotions during bank holiday weekends. If you’d also like to do this, there are several promotional tools you can use. They could help to increase traffic to your listings and improve conversion rates. Please note that some of these tools are only available to business sellers.
- Coded Coupon: Create and share your own discount codes for buyers.
- Multi-buy: Encourage customers to order more of the same listing with reduced prices for bigger orders. Sellers can see their sales increase up to 10% when using Multi-buy.*
- Offer to Buyers and Best Offer: Engage your interested buyers by offering a reduced price on your listing or giving them the opportunity to make their best offer.
- Order discount: Encourage customers to increase their order size with reduced prices for higher quantities or orders over a certain threshold.
- Promoted Listings: Boost visibility for your listings in prominent placements across the eBay network.
- Sale Event + Markdown: Create a Sale Event for in demand items or to offer reduced prices on part of your inventory. Show customers before and after prices with Markdown.
Don’t forget to optimise your inventory, too. Home & Garden is one such category that’s likely to see surges in searches owing to May’s abundance of bank holidays. This is backed up by eBay Ads insights from previous bank holidays, where searches for ‘sunlounger’ rose by a massive 221% over the course of the long weekend between 29-31 May 2021. Searches for ‘deck chair’ and ‘garden sofa’ also surged by 197% and 115%, respectively, in the same timeframe**.
Thank you for selling on eBay.
Your eBay Team
*eBay internal data, surveyed on UK and DE sites from January to April 2019
**eBay Ads
