My eBay sales have started to pick up a wee bit, and I
wanted to share insight into how to move-up in best match (and yes,
they've been messing with it).
If you see eBay "suggest" something (like 3 minimum
photos per listing), do it. The "suggestion" will have positive best
match results.
Absolutely have a minimum of 3 photos (more is better)
in the gallery section of your listings. If you list with a 3rd party
service, you might need to upload them manually after the item is
listed. If you don't load those great pictures in the gallery area, you are committing best match suicide.
Your photos MUST be minimum 1600 pixels wide (I
recommend 1650). I found that the software I was using told me my
photos were 1600, but when I checked with gimp.org (free photo editing
software) I found they were 1599. Yikes! That 1 pixel makes all the
difference! You can use software like gimp.org or Photoshop to increase
image size after the fact, but it is a time consuming and complicated PIA.
Stop using busy, html-loaded templates immediately. It has not been
explicitly stated by eBay, but some testing has shown html-heavy listings are
downgraded in best match.
Put as little text as possible in your descriptions,
utilize item specifics more. Both have shown to improve best match
results. The theory is that really long descriptions make the computer
think you are keyword spamming (from a search engine perspective, not a
violate eBay policies perspective).
Use item specifics, add your own.
Offer 1-day handling.
Offer free shipping.
Top Rated Seller (TRS) gets a small bump.
Run a Markdown Manager (MM) sale every day on your fixed price items. There is a
definite bump when using MM. It doesn't have to be much, you can
program a 10% off sale Mon-Tues, 15% off Wed-Thur, 10% off Fri-Sat, etc.
Short (2-day) MM sales which are constantly running have the best
effect. Note: You can mark everything up 10% before running 10% off all
the time.
Lower priced items rank higher than the same item at a higher price.
Auction items rank MUCH higher than fixed price.
With fixed price, you get a visibility bump when the item is
newly listed but I have NOT seen a corresponding visibility bump for fixed price
items about to end.
Auction items get a best match visibility bump when the
item is ending, but I have not seen a corresponding visibility bump
when they are newly listed.
EXCEPTION: When ANY item is newly listed (FP or
auction) it will appear in people's Feed (new: www.ebay.com/feed). If you
haven't opted-in to the feed yet do it now so you understand it. It
will be rolled-out to all eBayers soon, the sooner the better!
Older listings with a lot of impressions (an impression
is when something appears on a potential buyers list of results) will
be downgraded in best match.
As for Good-till-cancelled (GTC), I still think it is a good tool. I am
ending all my GTC listings this month, and relisting GTC after
refreshing the listings and editing the pictures. In August, I will go through the same process
again. I think a GTC purge once/year is helpful, but I do not think it
is in our best interest to stop using GTC.
Do you have other suggestions on how to post higher in Best Match results? Enter them with a comment below, and thanks!
Thanks, Sandi for posting your thoughts. I'll be sharing this post. For that purpose, it'd be great if it had a picture, LOL.
ReplyDeleteYou're welcome! I'll get pics in future posts, appreciate the request.
DeleteThank you very interesting.
ReplyDeleteLois
You are welcome!
DeleteThanks for the suggestions. I was wondering why you believe that auction items get a bigger bump. I asked ebay this and they said auction items are ranked the same way as FP. Did I get a person who doesn't know? What is your source of info? Thanks, Lauren
ReplyDeleteLauren, I believe auction gets a bigger bump based on testing I did last month. I sell fashion, so that was where I tested. I did a test search for "black wool pencil skirt", which that day yielded 907 results. I sampled the first 100. Here's the reason I argue that auction gets higher rank:
Delete69% of the top 100 are auctions, representing 43.1% of all auction listings (391 of 907 were auction items).
31% of the top 100 are FP, representing 4.2% of all FP listings (605 of 907 were fixed price items).
Great info! Will be testing it myself this month.
ReplyDeleteThanks! Please let me know if you have any questions.
DeleteInteresting statistics on FP vs Auction listings. I am not surprised that there are more FP than auctions.
ReplyDeleteThe last 2 listings I did I added Measurements to Item specifics, but am still using my template in SSB? Will that be OK or should I just not use SSB at all.
EBay listing templates is the xprocedure of business information, which is done through the Electronic Data Interchange and other technologies related to the internet. Now the E-commerce has become the most important features of the internet. E-commerce is basically a process that conducts a business through internet and with the help of computers that are linked with each other forming a network.
ReplyDeleteDifferent things can be easily performed through the E-commerce Internet shopping, online stocking, bond transactions, download and sell software, documents, graphics, music, etc. and business-to-business (B2B) transaction. The business can be done globally by using E-commerce.