It’s easy to think that you’ve found a great source of new stock, but did you know that one brand might perform significantly better on eBay than another?
In every category eBay has brands which are favoured more highly than others and it’s all down to those pesky Product Identifiers and Item Specifics.
Take Womens Accessories for example, there are currently just under 2 million listings (1,907,961 to be precise). From these listings if you check the brand you’ll discover that over half (1,137,338) have the Brand set as “unspecified”.
Most listings in this category (it should soon be all) will have the Brand specified, it’s a category where the Brand is a mandatory Product Identifier, so why are so many listed as unspecified?
The Brands aren’t unspecified, they’re just not the most popular brands and so eBay don’t have an option to narrow search and call them unspecified.
What this means to you is that if you have a choice of stock to source, it’s always worth checking which brands eBay favour more highly. If a buyer narrows their search by Brand you’ll find that Quiksilver (47 items), Reebok (20 items), Vogue (28 items) and Yves Saint Laurent (49 items) are all more popular than Longchamps (which if you search for the brand in the title you’ll find 68 items listing but is included as “Unspecified”).
Of course stocking a brand that eBay classifies as unspecified won’t stop your item selling. What will will do is simply not be presented to brand conscious buyers who might be happy to buy a Longchamps accessory but who instead choose an item from Vogue as that’s an option available as a tick box.
Do you think having your products brand lumped in the “unspecified” bucket could hurt your sales, or would you prefer a brand eBay favours more highly?
7 Responses
absolutely. if you specialise in being ten years behind the fashion curve, following ebay’s lead is for you.
From tests I have found the extra item specifics and sub categories seems to reduce listing visibility from generic searches until a buyer starts filtering down the item specifics then the items start to show the exact opposite of what most people expect to happen.
Just search a few generic terms and see the listing at the top of best match are the ones with the least item specifics and in the main categories and not the sub categories strange to say the least.
We think we will stick to atomic physics , finding a cure for disease , solving the migrant crises , were more likely to understand it and have success
Just curious but if you sell unique items only to the UK is time spent on item specifics time wasted? If I can save time on listings by reducing the work required it would be great and item specifics seems to be one area which takes up much time for little extra benefit.
The brands suggested on ebay seem to be from some list that is about 10 years old. In various categories that we sell in there are loads of popular brands that are missing.
I spoke to ebay at Catalyst about it and they claimed it was based on the number of searches but if it is, then it is definitely not automated.
It more looks to me that they defined what were the high street brands in each category and have never updated them since.