You may have noticed some differences to search for some eBay categories, especially in electronics. It appears that eBay have scrapped what were called product cards the New Shopping Experience. Listings are now sorted by Best Match only.
Product cards were introduced in 2011 on the back of eBay Catalogue. Rather than your listing being sorted in search results according to it’s own merits, product cards rolled up all similar items (Auctions and Fixed Price items as well as different item conditions) and search results were ordered in search by the best performing listing on the product card.
Now product cards have disappeared and listings are once again sorted according to Best Match. That’s an indicator that Best Match is now out-performing what was called eBay’s New Shopping Experience. We know that eBay are constantly testing to find out which options result in the highest number of sales and the change has been made in time for the busy Christmas shopping season.
Auctions
This is actually good news for auction sellers, rather than your listings being tied to a product card which may have been placed fairly low in search, your auctions are now free to rise to the top of search results and should see higher visibility.
Rare or Used Fixed Price Items
One downside I always found with New Shopping Experience was that it was dominated by listings from larger sellers. It was a lot harder to get a used item, even when it had attracted a large number of sales, because it had to compete with a brand new product with outrageously high sales for instance from a daily deal. You’ll still have to compete with these listings, but at least your own item is once again free to rise and fall in Best Match on it’s own merits.
Catalogue
One question is is bound to be asked is now that New Shopping Experience has gone should we still list against the eBay Catalogue? I would suggest the answer should be yes whenever there is a matching product. It appears that some Google search results are still landing on . The product pages are still very much alive on eBay with plenty of links such as from eBay product Reviews and Guides.
More importantly it enables eBay to match your products and they’re constantly developing around the catalogue data. I’ve already spotted new page headers in some categories such as the one shown if you – if your item isn’t listed against eBay catalogue it’ll probably not be found by buyers.
Listing Strategy
The best advice we can give is to carry on listing with catalogue as normal, but the big difference is that your product will now be displayed with it’s own title rather than the title eBay gave to the product card. This works very much to your benefit as often product card titles weren’t (to be brutally honest) very good! Make sure that the keywords in your 80 word title are in the first 50 characters as these will be what appear on most search result pages.
If you choose you can still use catalogue images, but again in most cases we’d suggest using your own product shots and especially for used items show the actual product, not a catalogue image.
Catalogue will auto-complete some item specifics for you, and these remain just as important.
Your thoughts
Are you glad to see the end of New Shopping Experience on eBay? Did it boost your sales as a seller or did you find it convenient as a buyer? Have you seen a change in sales in the last week in categories which previously had the New Shopping Experience and do you have any tips for getting your listings higher in search results now that it’s gone?
3 Responses
I think what eBay should have done was maintain the top 2 – 3 most likely product matches, stuck those product cards at the top of search, and then had the remaining search results as normal. Previously it was a mess with product cards scattered throughout the search results. Rather than improve upon it they just dropped it.
Now if people want to get the cheapest of a particular product you have to know to click that “Products and Reviews” tab. Otherwise if you sort by price you are going to get everything that eBay filtered from you in best match.
I did have someone tell me this week his sales cut in half immediately after the product cards were dropped. He was a single quantity seller but usually the cheapest or one of the cheapest in the product he’d sell. Single items naturally can’t compete in best match.
Thank goodness! I found the ‘product cards’ extremely difficult when finding something I wanted to buy.
I have noticed over the weekend that some items say ‘listed as xxxxxxxx’ at the top of the page, indicating which catalogue item they’re listed against.
Im glad. They don’t make a difference for selling but I hated them for the buying experience. It made it complicated when looking for products.
I much prefer searching through the listings myself.