eSellerPro had some great advice for their sellers on listing optimisation at their seller update today. Most of it is pretty basic stuff which all sellers should be doing anyway, but it’s surprising how many still don’t. They explained that they have seen sellers implement the following simple steps and then had traffic to their listings triple and sales double.
It’s all about being found in eBay search and making sure that your listings are visible in search and the more eyes on your listings the more likely you are to get that sale. Search visibility is the single most important factor in your eBay success – if you don’t appear on the first few pages of search results then you won’t get sales.
1) Optimise titles for each marketplace
eBay users titles and item specifics for search – don’t repeat information everywhere. Don’t forget that on multi-variation listings each variation also counts as a keyword in search. Don’t spam eBay with the same sizes and colours twice.
Relevant phrase / word chain for each marketplace – use tools like Bayestimator, Google keyword planner and Terapeak, for instance do people search for “Laptops” or “Cheap Laptops”?
Use researched words and related reports to monitor
Avoid irrelevant words such as “New” “and” etc, as they’re taking up space which could be used for keywords (eBay 80 characters, Amazon 100 but varies).
2) eBay Item Specifics
Make sure that you use the eBay values for item specifics – if you use alternatives then they’ll not show up in the left hand side product specifics on the search page. When a buyer drills down for a particular size, colour or manufacturer your product will be excluded hiding your item if your item specifics don’t match.
Using the correct item specifics will also help your items be visible in search – think of them as an extension of the title.
3) Clean your images
Clean your listings up if you have watermarks, borders, flags or other graffiti on your images you should remove them if you haven’t already. This change will help conversion rates and ranking.
4) Price
eSellerPro didn’t mention price as being an important factor, mainly because they wanted to give tips which don’t cost you money. Price is however important and I’ve often seen listings sitting on eBay at anything up to 10 times the current market price. If you’ve listed a product at an attractive price it doesn’t mean that price will still be attractive six months later. If you’ve not revised your prices recently it’s time to do so before you miss out on Christmas sales.
8 Responses
Hi Chris,
Any suggestion on how frequently shall the seller do price checking?
Regularly!! At least once a month on any product that hasn’t had a sale in the last 30 days would be a good place to start
3) Clean your images – Looking at present search results it doesn’t seem like this is effecting search yet.
1) Optimise titles – Are all of the 80 characters in eBay title of equal weight in search now? Didn’t it used to be just the first 56 or something?
2) eBay Item Specifics – If the eBay item specific doesn’t accurately match your product should you use one anyway?
It certain cats they are not always that great. In many cats they are not used in drill down menus but they do give a quick summery of the product when a buyer first views the item page.
“Looking at present search results it doesn’t seem like this is effecting search yet”
It doesn’t appear to be, but it will do soon. Expect at the very least listings with images below 500 pixels to fail on relist
“Are all of the 80 characters in eBay title of equal weight in search now”
Not only characters in titles, but also item specifics and variation title on MVL listings. However in many views (e.g. gallery search view) only the first 55 characters show so make sure your attention grabbing confirmation keywords are first and things like part numbers are last.
“If the eBay item specific doesn’t accurately match your product should you use one anyway?
Tricky one! In short probably. If a buyer narrows search results by item specifics and you’re not included your product will be hidden in search. So if it’s a broadly correct specific use it! An example is that there are 3,087 laptops with 15″ screens but only 119 with 15.1″ screens on eBay today. Figure no buyer will complain at 0.1″ extra a bit like my 3 litre car is actually is in reality 2,967cc not 3,000cc.
Item specifics are very much like choosing the correct category – if most sellers list in one category there’s a reason for it and the same with item specifics – don’t pick incorrect ones, but pick the most popular that broadly fits your item (e.g. “Pinks” or “Blues” not “Rose” or “Skyblue” for main colour)
However get something badly matched and it’ll show up too many times in search and no one will ever buy it – the more search views without sales the lower eBay will place your listing.
Some search views are most definitely better than none though!
Getting traffic to our eBay Stores is vital to our success. Some of our listings will show up in eBay search depending on the competition for that item and else where on eBay. It does help to have a balance of store / auction items and use cross promotions.