I’ve been trying to work out the value of paying for the with Best Match and it’s not straightforward.
In the past it’s been a pretty obvious choice, Featured Plus would get your listing to the top of the page it naturally falls on. With the default listing order as “Ending Soonest” that would always mean at the end of the auction your item would be at the top of the first page of search results.
Now in Best Match items will no longer be sorted “Ending Soonest”, but as most relevant to the buyer’s search. This means that your Featured Plus upgrade costing £9.95 (up to £29.95 in some catagories) may never make it to the top of the first page of search results.
Actually it could be even worse than that, because if you aren’t being advantaged in search, or currently if you’re being disadvantaged compared to those with standard search standing, then your items are highly unlikely ever to appear on the first page of search results.
It may be that when Best Match is implemented it will still show the Best Matching Featured Plus items first, but to be honest if you can pay to be Better Matched than your competitors it’s not really Best Match is it? If, as a buyer, I’m expecting to see the Best Matched products that’s what I should be presented with.
There may still be users that manually change their sort preferences to “Ending Soonest” in which case Featured Plus would still work well, but do you want to pay for a listing upgrade reliant on users preferences?
Should you carry on paying for Featured Plus listing enhancements once Best Match is fully rolled out in the UK? Personally I’ll probably save my money, and invest it in cheaper listing enhancements such as .
Making my listing stand out when it does appear strikes me as a lot more cost effective than paying for a Featured Plus enhancement which may never be seen.
4 Responses
I have been using it for years but might think again now.
A featured multiple BIN item in 2 cats. costs me £61 for 10 days!! Now I have been happy to pay that because it gave a good return, but now maybe not.
I can list a £600 bath in single BIN format for £1.13 which gives me nearly 54 more visiable items for the same money and spreading them over 3,5,7,10 days should give better results.
Out of interest, who actually uses bold,highlight and subtitle in a standard listing? do they work.
You guys must be reading minds. I was just going to blog about this because we found out yesterday that Featured listings aren’t featured if you’re being pushed down in Best Match.
One of our new clients had items that were being “disadvantaged,” so he was showing up on page 8 of search results. But because he paid for Featured, he was at the top with his Featured listing on page 8!
Totally not worth it! I’ll be blogging on that this morning. Great minds… 🙂
Hey Debbie, see you at Live! and feel free to link us 😉
💡 Very good points. It hadn’t occurred to me the effect ‘best match’ has. Time to save some money I think, especially with the very low hit rate at the moment 🙁
Brian