How to Host an Effective Sale on Your Reverb Shop

Preferred Sellers are able to host their own sales on Reverb. Because musical instrument retailers aren’t bound by seasonality like some other retail industries, MI retailers should use sales as a means to increase traffic to their shop, stimulate orders, help meet sales goals, and grow their customer base. Below are best practices for the average seller hosting a sale on Reverb.

This is typically the first thing a buyer is going to look at. This will either entice a buyer to check out the contents of your sale—or turn away from it.

• Use a Blanket Discount Percent: "Up to" is vague and creates uncertainty. If you don’t make the same discount across the board, buyers will know listings at the high-end range are limited and that low-end discounts can fall into single digits.

• Discount in Increments of 5%: 13% for a Friday the 13th sale or 14% for a Valentine’s Day sale may seem clever, but they’re unattractive to buyers. Most buyers are thinking about what the end price will be. Discounting in increments of five makes the math far simpler.

• Don't Go Lower Than 10%: The steeper the discount, the better, but sales below 10% simply do not incentivize buyers to make a purchase the way discounts 10% or more do.

If your discount has piqued a buyer’s curiosity enough for them to check out your sale, the contents of it will determine whether or not they’ll pull the trigger on an item.

Choose Desirable and Appropriately Priced Gear

• Online buyers want desirable gear at a flexible price.

• While sales can be a resource to incentivize purchases for gear that’s been sitting around for an extended period of time, it’s important to understand that those items haven’t sold for a reason—usually due to an undesirable item or price. A sale full of these listings is going to perform worse than a competitor’s sale of desirable and appropriately priced gear.

• Incorporate used items.

Stay Focused

• A focused sale is easier to promote than a sale with items all over the category spectrum. A sale of 50 desirable pedals will do better than a sale with 100 listings across 10 categories.

• A sale of 50 quality pedals will do better than a sale of 20. Find the right balance.

• The more quality listings in a focused sale, the better.

The internet is vast, and no matter when you’re hosting a sale there will be someone else doing the same. Picking a proper time-frame can help your sale stand out among the rest.

Give It a Week Online

• Not every buyer sees your sale at the same time. Unless you have a loyal following of customers who check up on your shop daily, a week-long sale is the sweet spot.

• Flash sales are often unsuccessful for most online retailers.

No More Than a Month

• If you’re able to discount an item for more than a month, you can let that discount price live in perpetuity. A price-drop on that listing will do the trick.

• Anything over a month totally diminishes the urgency that sales create.

Multiple Sales Per Year

• Sales are most effective when they’re focused, which grants sellers the ability to host multiple sales each year.

• Cadence with your customer base. Helpful in staying in front of buyers.

Sellers who are proactive with their sale promotion see more orders than those who rely solely on Reverb. Sellers who double-down their sale items by discounting them in multiple places will see a greater order volume than those who utilize a single channel.

• Leverage Your Buyer Network: Reverb advertises your listings for you, but it shouldn’t stop with us. Regular communication with your buyers, social media followers, and newsletter subscribers is paramount to the success of any retailer. If you’re not advertising your sale to those people, you’re doing yourself and your customers a disservice.

• Create an Omni-Channel Experience: If you have a brick-and-mortar location and are running a sale in it, run an online sale concurrent with your physical location. This will only increase the likelihood of your gear moving.