Using the Strike Through Pricing (STP) option
Please note: eBay has stopped enabling STP for new sellers.
If your eBay account has already been activated for STP, you're lucky and you can still use it as usual. But if they never enabled it for you then there is currently no way to use STP. ยป more details
Strike through pricing, offered to certain sellers on eBay, is a visual treatment showing a line drawn through the original price of an item and a second, lower price offering. The original list price (or "Compare at price") comes from the seller or a catalog and the new price from the seller is displayed as the "Now" price.
How to access Strike Through Pricing (STP)
Sellers should contact their Relationship Manager to discuss whether or not it's appropriate for them to use strike through pricing and how it may affect their performance on eBay. This option is available on selected eBay sites, including US, UK, Germany, Canada, Australia, France, Italy and Spain.
The original list price - aka "Compare at price"
The original list price (or "compare at price" in eBay terminology) is the price (excluding shipping and handling costs) that comes from the seller or a catalog for the same item or one virtually identical to it. The price is based on items that are currently for sale or have been for sale within the last 90 days by another online retailer.
The new, lower price is displayed as the "now" price.
Listing formats & uses / new items
Strike through pricing is also only available for new items that are the same or virtually identical at different online retailers. Once an item is no longer in new condition, price and savings are too unique for comparison.
To learn more about strike through pricing, visit http://pages.ebay.com/help/sell/strike-through.html.
Strike Through Pricing vs Markdown Manager
As far as WP-Lister is concerned, STP and the Markdown Manager work in an entirely different way. While the STP / original retail price information is part of the usual AddItem and ReviseItem requests sent by WP-Lister, discounts managed by the Markdown Manager are handles in an entirely different section of My eBay and not neither stored with the listing item itself, nor can they be set when revising a listing.
Even revising an item manually on eBay would remove any sales you created in Markdown Manager - as eBay states in their Markdown Manager guidelines:
Revising the item price and/or postage cost for an item on the Revise my item page removes the item from a sale.
We can only recommend against using the Markdown Manager on listings that are managed through WP-Lister as your sales would be disabled when an item is revised from WP-Lister. This is not a limitation of WP-Lister itself, but rather of the eBay API.
Using the Strike Through Price profile option in WP-Lister
When you list a product which has both a regular and sale price set in WooCommerce, WP-Lister uses the sale price as the actual "Buy Now" price on eBay, but the regular price is not sent to eBay by default.
If you want the regular price be displayed on eBay as the original retail price / strike through price, you have to enable the "Strike Through Pricing" option in your profile - http://www.wplab.com/plugins/wp-lister/documentation/profiles/#Other_Options - and revise your listings after doing so.
MSRP Price & Strike Through Price
In version 2.0.9.8 or higher, WP-Lister for eBay now allows you to use your MSRP price as your strike through price, when the MSRP price plugin or WP-Lister for Amazon is installed (which adds it's own MSRP field). Simply click the strike through price options in your profile under "Other Options" and you will see MSRP as a selection.
Alternative ways to create sales in WP-Lister
If you are not eligible to use STP, you can still use WP-Lister to list lower prices on eBay compared to your WooCommerce prices or current eBay prices:
Either change your "Start price" found in the eBay section on your edit product page to display a different (lower) price than what the product is currently selling for on eBay or your website. You could use a CSV plugin to edit them in bulk as well.
Or set the "Price / Start price" option in the listing profile to change the price for many listings at once. You can use percentages as well, so if you want to reduce the price by 10% for all items using a particular profile, you would enter "-10%" as the price in that listing profile.
Update: eBay has stopped enabling STP for new sellers
Unfortunately as of 2018 eBay no longer allows new sellers to use STP. Even if you're not a new seller, but never asked them to activate STP for you, then now it's apparently too late. If this feels frustrating to you, rest assured that you're not alone. Other sellers have been complaining about this on the forum, but eBay only replies:
"We no longer support Strike Through Pricing option. [...] For seller who already enrolled into STP that will still work, however we are not activating any more new sellers for STP." ( link )
This news was a big surprise for us, considering that they never made a public announcement of this change in policy, nor have they updated their API docs, which still state that you can get whitelisted for the DiscountPriceInfo container:
"Discount pricing is available to qualified sellers (and their associated developers) who participate in the Discount Pricing Program. Once qualified, sellers receive a 'special account flag' (SAF) that allows them to apply Discount Pricing to both single-variation and multi-variation items. STP is intended for eBay partners and their sellers only." ( link )
"Using this container, a seller can supply original retail price and discount price for an item to clarify the discount treatment (also known as strike-through pricing). [...] This feature is available for large enterprise sellers via white list." ( link )
But what's really disappointing is that eBay doesn't provide an adequate alternative to the STP option, even though they keep suggesting to use Seller Hub and/or Markdown Manager instead, but they fail to mention that these are tools to create temporary promotions in an entirely different and more complex system (instead of simply allowing the seller to provide an STP or MSRP), and that your item has to be untouched (no revision) for 14 days to be eligible for such a promotion:
"The item must have been listed, without any change to item price, postage price or item description, for at least 14 days before it can be included in a sale." and "Items can be included in a sale for a maximum of 14 days, after which it needs to be excluded from a sale for at least 14 days before it can be added to a sale again." ( link )
We don't see any technical reason for refusing new sellers to allow to use STP, especially since their alternatives (by design) don't work properly with 3rd party listing tools. That being said, none of the other big players seems to have heard the news yet either, but we'll keep an eye on any alternative that would work with WP-Lister in the future.