When sending a discount offer is worth it

Discounting has a bad reputation among resellers, mostly deservedly. Cutting prices across the board trains buyers to wait and erodes the margin that makes the work worthwhile.

Offers are a different instrument, and worth separating out.

The distinction

A price cut is public and permanent. It tells everyone, including people who were going to pay full price, that the number was negotiable.

An offer goes to a specific person who has already told you they are interested. Nobody else sees it. The list price stays where it is. That is a genuinely different transaction, and it is the one worth using.

Who to send to, and why it works

Someone who liked or saved an item has done the hard part. They found it, they looked at it, they decided they wanted it, and then something stopped them — usually the price, sometimes just the moment passing.

An offer addresses exactly that hesitation, for exactly the people who had it. This is why offers to likers tend to convert far better than any equivalent public discount: you are not persuading anyone to want the item. They already do.

Reskale can send a discount in bulk to the people who already liked an item, on the marketplaces that support it, which turns this from a per-item chore into something you do across a batch.

When not to

• On something newly listed. Give it time at full price first. You do not know yet whether the price was the problem.
• On your best items. If something is genuinely scarce, the right buyer will pay. An offer on a sought-after item is money left on the table.
• Repeatedly to the same people. Teach someone that an offer always follows a like and they will never buy at list again. The instrument stops working.
• When the margin is not there. A discount that takes you below your real cost per sale, counting fees and postage, is not a sale. It is paying someone to take your inventory.

The order to try things in

If something is not moving: fix the photos, then fix the title, then offer to the people who liked it, then and only then cut the public price.

Most people go straight to the last step, which is both the most expensive and the least informative. The earlier steps cost nothing and tell you something.