Featured First to be retired
From early September, eBay will be retiring one of the most powerful listing enhancements for getting your listings to the top of Best Match – .
Costing £134.95 for 30 day listings, Featured First gives you a chance to appear as one of the listings on the first page of search results in the Featured Items section. This naturally leads to an increase in sales and the feature is widely used across the site by sellers to give a boost to new listings.
eBay say that you can get the best visibility by maintaining Top Rated Seller status, giving great service and following eBay policies. The truth of the matter is, however, that Featured First is one of the last great ways to game Best Match and from September sellers will have to find new ways to get their listings to the top of search.
The best way to ensure visibility is to get sales. Nothing else really matters except when a buyer sees your listing, considers it a compelling offer and so they click and buy. Sales leads to greater visibility and greater visibility drives more sales.
To drive initial sales we’d recommend offering a low price (use Mark Down Manager to temporarily lower the price until you gain traction) and add Best Offers to attract buyers. Often accepting a couple of low ball Best Offers is a cheaper way to boost your Best Match position than the £134.95 Featured First cost anyway!
Use eBay’s email marketing to drive traffic to your key listings, highlighting your promotional pricing. Cross sell your products from those of your listings which are already performing well and use every trick in the book such as Item Specifics, title keywords, great images, listing against eBay catalogue, subtitles and listing in secondary categories to increase the chances of attracting those first few vital sales.
Once you have a listing that’s performing well and high up the Best Match results, you can edit it to adjust pricing to a level you’re happy to run with over time. Adjusting pricing is something you should be using as a sales tactic anyway. Sellers who currently use Featured First are simply going to have to work harder and smarter to achieve the same results.
Duplicate listings policy for Auction with Buy It Now option
eBay are to start treating Auctions with the Buy It Now option as Fixed Price listings as far as the goes. You’ll no longer be able to create multiple Auctions with Buy It now for the same item.
eBay will also ban the creation of an Auction with Buy It Now if a Fixed Price listing for the same item already exists.
This is basically another way that sellers have been gaming Best Match for visibility and another loop hole that’s being closed.
Fast’n’Free
From October, the eBay message will be automatically displayed on listings where a seller offers free postage and an estimated delivery date within 3 working days.
We first spotted Fast’n’Free on UK listings back in March of this year, but at the time were told it was an error and it was removed from view. Now it appears it’ll be back in time for the Christmas holiday/Christmas selling season to let buyers know that not only is shipping free but it’s also a speedy service. Anything that keeps seasonal shopping last for longer on eBay in December makes enormous sense.
One Response
I’ll be sad to see Featured First go, a great way to launch a new product, typically we run 2 a week.
The duplicate policy update is very welcome news, assuming it’s automated by eBay’s internal systems picking them up? if not and it’s down to member reporting then they may as well of not bothered.