To offer, or not to offer…
March 11, 2024 Leave a Comment
Dear Amazon, Etsy, and other marketplace product managers,
You should consider taking a page from Poshmark and eBay‘s playbooks and enable sellers to quickly make offers to customers that have wish listed, saved for later, or abandoned products in their carts.
Aside from cart price change notifications, there are few options to nudge me to buy the hundreds of products that I have earmarked as possible purchases on your sites. If I “add to watchlist” or “like” something on eBay or Poshmark respectively, I am likely to receive a discount – sometimes within minutes – incenting me to buy NOW!
Also consider turning the table to enable customers to make offers to sellers, which can help to signal that their price is too high; but, be sure to complete the sale automatically if the offer is accepted.
I hypothesize that increased timely interaction between sellers and customers will lead to more sales at lower prices, leading to more stickiness on your marketplace.
As Jeff Bezos said in his 2017 letter to shareholders: “One thing I love about customers is that they are divinely discontent. Their expectations are never static – they go up. It’s human nature. We didn’t ascend from our hunter-gatherer days by being satisfied. People have a voracious appetite for a better way, and yesterday’s ‘wow’ quickly becomes today’s ‘ordinary’.”
Don’t rest on your laurels, customers won’t have it!
It’s not like remote controls are in constant use. They lay on the coffee table all day and night, waiting for the 60 seconds a day that you actually want to use it. It is really frustrating when the batteries are getting low on their charge. I go out of my way to contort my body to ensure that I am pointing the remote directly at the IR sensor of the cable box. I press the button harder in case that helps deliver more juice to the transmitter. When that doesn’t work, I see if the TV remote has batteries that work — darn it, that one takes AAA batteries. Now what? I get up and walk over to the junk drawer in the kitchen that contains a bunch of C batteries, a single D battery, two 9-volt batteries — I put one of them on my tongue to feel the metallic shock like I used to when I was a kid — and a couple of loose AA batteries from different brands in the bottom. I grab those and come back to the couch and replace both batteries. Nothing. Now I take one of the old ones, and one of the ones from the bottom of the junk drawer. Nope. Now I switch them around. Nada. You get the point, by this time it would have been so much easier to get off my butt and walk over to the cable box and change the channel. 