Joe Szczygielski is an eCommerce expert at Mole End software, specialising in their One Stop Order Processing product, and enjoys helping to make people aware of how his product can be used to make order processing efficient and easy. Joe has also sold on eBay for a number of years and built a solid understanding of the site and has a passion for providing an overall good experience for his buyers. Today he shares some of his top tips:
Increasing visibility on eBay
If you have items for sale on eBay, you must be wondering how (although more expensive) other sellers are managing to reach the top rank for a certain product. A lot of people think that it is going down to the lowest price possible, although this certainly gets accounted for, there are still a number of other factors that make you top rank for the best match of the products you are selling. You need to remember that when customers are searching for a product on eBay, the default sorting method is ‘Best Match’ therefore you need to optimise your listings to conform to eBay’s guidelines.
Be a good seller
First things first, you will want to . There are requirements to become a Top Rated Seller which are fairly easy to achieve, these consist of having at least 98% positive feedback, being a member of the PowerSeller programme, having at least 100 transactions and £1,000 in sales during the last 12 months.
Get some Recent Sales
Another factor that eBay are taking into account are the amount of sales that a listing has, so the more sales you can get on a single listing, the more likely it will rank higher on the listings. If you have an eBay shop subscription, I would recommend choosing the end date of the listing to be Good ‘Till Cancelled. This will allow you to keep the sold figure on your listing until you have run out of stock.
Once you have got a certain amount of sales on a listing, you are able to stay higher ranked, here is a good procedure to keep this figure high and increase the amount of sales on a listing to a steady amount:
- Start off by listing the product with Good ‘Till Cancelled and introducing it at a 20% reduced price making you the cheapest option for people to choose from.
- After you have received your first 5 sales on that item, increase the price by 5%.
- Then once you have received another 5 sales, increase by another 5%.
- And again, after you have received the next 5 sales increase the price by 5%.
- Now you will be increasing the price to what you were originally going to and you will be set up to have a good amount of sales attached to the listing.
What’s your top tip to get your item to the top of eBay search?
31 Responses
Using good til cancelled actually hits sales.
You lose the bonus gained when an item is newly listed, which is another key way buyers search.
This will happen every 10 or 30 days, depending on the duration of your listings.
GTC never appears as newly listed and never gets this upswing.
Been on Ebay for 12 years and sold over 500,000 listings, so we have seen this work over a long period.
To be honest all that messing around with prices won’t help. Buyers are a lot smarter than people give credit for and they watch what is happening on price.
Why not just list items people want at a price they are happy to pay. Make sure the item is as described (or better!) and post promptly,
Simples.
~
‘You need to remember that when customers are searching for a product on eBay, the default sorting method is ‘Best Match’ …. ‘
With respect, that might apply to bulk consumer products but eBay is, for now at least, more than that.
My default sort is not ‘Best Match’ and I doubt that it is for many of my customers either.
What about some advice for sellers who sell one off items? I don’t see how raising the price by 5% would generate more sales on a GTC listing whether you are selling toothbrushes or gold watches.
I heard the other day that if you had a new listing, with no history, you could “give it a sales history”.
When listing you choose “Sell Similar” using one of your existing well established listings. This apparently brings across the sales history. You then change the details to match the new item.
Voila. New item with an existing sales history.
Anyone tried this? Does it work?
If it doesn’t work for you then don’t shoot the messenger. It’s just one of those things you pick up from here and there.
I list using order management software so haven’t tried this out yet.
Good luck for anyone wanting to try it. 🙂
My default search is lowest price+p&p. I search for the item I’m after via this default search and then I scroll down looking for a TRS. I then check the sellers dispatch star rating. If it’s 4.8 or higher I’ll buy from them as I know they’ll ship quick.
I was advised to use good till cancelled for my unique vintage watches and have actually seen an increase in watchers, when they are about to end they do seem to get more visibility.
The whole sell-through thing to improve search visibility is whats killing ebay as a marketplace in my opinion. How can you get a product established when others, especially Chinese have sold thousands already and the price is impossible for a UK business to compete with.
Its why people are switching to Amazon, sellers claim they still get sales and visibility even if their items aren’t the lowest price.
This visibility manipulation goes against the organic nature of search. I’m not surprised Google continue to penalise ebay
Your probably selling luxury watchs to china so they can be cloned and sent back in their trillions
Its simple, most buyers are savvy and know how to filter search results.
Basic answer? Be the cheapest (including shipping). Forget the blah blah strategy bullshit.
Do this and your stock will sell – GUARANTEED.
But for the impatient idiots out there who can’t be bothered to search with filters have a few other listings with an inflated price – you’ll be suprised how ofton ithey also sell!
Long live The Revolution!! 🙂
love it, another example of an “expert” who actually ain’t got a clue when it comes to the bottom line.
Know your maths first:
£10 – 20%
= £8.00
+ 5%
= £8.40
+5%
= £8.82
+5%
= £9.26
my brain calculates I am now 8% short of my ideal price.
(not to mention, working on tight margins to be competitive in first place, lost in post, returns)
some good comments above from ACTUAL TRADERS not so good from an EXPERT, now where have i read that before……..