eBay to push fashion outlets for Christmas
30/08/2010 at 09:40
The Guardian reports that eBay UK will be pushing its Fashion Outlet harder than ever in the run up to Christmas. As well as the current billboard campaign, adverts will appear in glossy women’s magazines including Vogue, OK!, Grazia, Look and Elle.
Angus McCarey, director of eBay Enterprise, said “The Fashion Outlet is our fastest growing sales channel.” Fashion sales have grown 25% in the last year. Since launch in May, sales through Fashion Outlet have generated around £4m revenue for the brands sellling through the site.
eBay’s publicity remains relentlessly about the brands. Angus again: “We know that consumers are increasingly looking for a range of high-quality high street goods at low prices, and eBay’s Fashion Outlet provides them with the ability to purchase goods from the brands they love.”
Is there any good news for smaller sellers in all this? It’s to be hoped that there is a knock-on effect from promoting eBay as a destination site for fashion shoppers. The bizarrely unusable category landing page for Clothing, Shoes and Accessories does feature items from non-outlet sellers. With 4.6 million buyers purchasing fashion items from eBay UK in the three months from May this year, at least some of them must end up in the shops of underpromoted smaller sellers. Mustn’t they?
JohnC says
12:30 pm on 30/08/2010
£4 million in over 4 months, is that all! If there really are 4.6 million buyers, that’s about 80p each.
That’s seller turnover. What’s ebay’s take, maybe 5% (perhaps less) plus the paypal fees, let’s say 7% overall.
Has 280k even covered their costs?
That’s abysmal, far worse than I’d imagined.
Sue Bailey says
12:32 pm on August 30th, 2010
£4m is Outlets only.
4.6 million buyers is the whole site.
Cassie says
5:58 pm on August 30th, 2010
I am confused!
I understand that the outlets took £4million in 3 months.
“With 4.6 million buyers purchasing fashion items from eBay UK in the three months from May this year”
to me that reads 4.6 million people actually bought fashion items – so why are you now saying, no there are 4.6 million people on ebay in total?
Do you mean that every single person on ebay bought a fashion item in those 3 months?
Or do you mean that £4 million was spent by an unknown number of people – but could be as high as 4.6 million people
JohnC says
12:34 pm on 30/08/2010
Yes, but the 4.6m is fashion buyers, so the 80p is the share captured by fashion outlet.
Sue Bailey says
12:35 pm on August 30th, 2010
No, we don’t have the data to make that statement. We don’t know how much those 4.6 million people spent.
JohnC says
12:39 pm on 30/08/2010
Sorry to be horribly argumentative, but we know that £4m was spent by fashion buyers on outlet, from a possible pool of 4.6m people. Of course it was not 4.6m people spending 80p each, but a smaller (unknown) number spending a larger (also unknown) amount each.
No, you are right, it’s a briliant result, ebay will have spent nothing like £280k in set up, marketing and advertising costs.