You’re here to make money right? So how can you get the biggest improvement in sales on eBay for the least amount of effort? Today we look at a strategy for tweaking your listings showing you where to focus and which listings to start with.
We all know that we should be looking to improve our eBay listings, but if you’ve 100s or 1000s of listings picking where to start is always a bit tricky. The answer is not to try and edit all your listings in one go, but to work on them regularly and target the changes which will produce the biggest increase in sales.
There are some tools out there such as ListSmart, which aim to validate your listings against the big data they’ve gleaned from scanning millions of eBay listings daily. They’ll be able to tell you the likely effect of making certain changes like adding more item specifics, more gallery images or even having a second postage option.
There are simpler ways to work however and even with all the brilliance of clever software, it may have you chasing improvements on the wrong listing. You will already know which are your top performing listings and those listings you thought would perform well but are disappointing. These are the listings to start with.
There are always some parts of a listing which will perform more than others and that is the attributes which get a buyer to click on your product. No clicks equals no sales. With that in mind the top things to consider are:
Top 4 eBay listing tweaks guaranteed to increase sales
Titles
80 characters are available, but the first 55 are higher value. In some eBay search results titles are truncated so get the important information up front and leave lesser value information for the end of your title.
Yes it costs money, but subtitles are one of the most valuable eBay listing enhancements available today when used strategically.
Images
Use a square image when possible. It takes up the maximum amount of space in search results. Landscape images may simply donate space to your competitors listings! Also add as many images as you can to gallery rather than simply embedding them in your description. eBay will optimise them for mobile and ensure buyers get to see them.
Product Data
If your product is new and has a bar code, get the GTIN, Brand and Manufacturer’s Part Number (MPN) and add the data. eBay require it, Google requires it, it’ll bring more eyes to your listing.
Item Specifics
Don’t waste your time filling out 20 item specifics for every product you sell. Not until you’ve at least got what I call the ‘Essential Item Specifics‘ filled out for all your listings. Work on the Essentials and then the Desirables and leave the lesser value Item Specifics for another day.
Strategy
Chase the money. Pick your top listings, the listings where you’re heavily invested in inventory and those that need to perform well. Ignore the listing for a one off product – do you really care if it sells or not? Yes it would be nice for a one off item to have a perfect listing but time spent on the product listing where you have 100 units in stock will always outperform any single item listing.
Once you’ve picked the set of listings you’re going to work on, don’t stress about every detail. Pick the parts of the listing which are easiest to improve and the essential bit you know will make the biggest impact. Leave things like ‘Optional Item Specifics‘ for another day when you’ve more time.
Of course you should be looking at things like shipping options, returns policies, listing design and a whole host of other things, not to forget monitoring your seller standards. Ultimately though, it doesn’t matter how right you get all the back office stuff if your listings simply aren’t being returned in search results.
Action
To get started identify your top 10% performing listings by revenue (or preferably profit) and set a goal to edit the Images, Titles, Product Data and Item Specifics by a set date. Target the listings which will generate your sales over the Christmas period as they’re the ones that will produce the greatest profits as we come into Q4.
28 Responses
If I search for a “Corsa Door Handle” for example from ebays home page I get a load of results showing a filler cap at the top but further down there are some external door handles
Then if I filter by “external car door handles”
I get a different set of handles at the top of best match does putting your products in the child categories reduce your visibility in the home page root search results it seems to look like it from examples I have tried
The sellers who use the category “Doors & Door Parts” for external door handles get better results on generic search from eBay’s home page than those sellers who use the correct category “Car Exterior Door Handles”
Its just a mess where sellers who put the effort to list in the correct category are demoted down the generic home page search.
eBay seem to use the categories to exclude the sellers items listed in the correct child categories from the generic search results instead of including all results and the child filter remove the ones outside the child category.
I hope this makes sense are we wasting our time using the child categories when listing?
in what way is this guaranteed to improve sales?
we did all that before, sales went down.
this is ebay we’re speaking about, the only guarantee is they will do you over at every chance.
Hi Chris. Go to manage my shop, it’s one of the marketing tools.
So how often would you recommend doing this?