The need to make revisions to your eBay listings at their behest has been a bit of a theme for this year. First you had to take out any active content in your listings to comply with the new rules prohibiting such things. And then there has been the challenge of dealing with removing contact details from the written part of your listings too. That is required as of September.
(There is perhaps a little irony that concurrently to requiring these changes eBay decommissioned the familiar and trusted Turbo Lister which would be the obvious tool of choice to make such changes to listings by many sellers.)
And with these changes required, and as you delve below the bonnet and tinker with your eBay listings, it’s a good opportunity to consider optimisation of other aspects of your listings. There are all sorts of things that you can amend to help with findability in eBay’s Best Match search system. Probably the most significant, although certainly one of the duller changes, is improving your items specifics.
Another concern should be optimising your eBay listings for mobile. It’s important for all sellers because over 50% of eBay sales are now made via a mobile device such as a smartphone or tablet. But in certain categories (say fashion and home and garden) it’s likely to be more than that. Especially if you have listings that are old, and have been used for a long time and perhaps become a little flabby, it’s well worth examining them to find out how good or bad they look on various devices.
And probably the biggest change you can make it adding any relevant additional images. The buying experience on tablets and smartphones is predominantly visual so anything you can do to improve your look is well worth considering.
The other thing to look at is the written portion of your listing. Where possible, pare it back and excise any extraneous text in there. Some of your instructions make you feel better but buyers probably don’t read or take head of them. Making the text as lean as possible works better on mobile devices. To find out more about optimising your listings for mobile, check out our video below.
