Cassini Case Study, Part I: Auction vs. Fixed Price

She's not sure about this Cassini thing!

Two weeks ago, John Donahoe, CEO of eBay, was a presenter at the Sanford C. Bernstein Strategic Decisions Conference in New York.  

This past Wednesday, The Top Rated Webinar Series presented "Search at eBay" with Hugh Williams, eBay's VP of Experience, Search, and Platforms.

Both men spoke in depth about search at eBay, and the new Cassini search algorithm.  I highly recommend all full-time eBay sellers listen to both presentations if you want to understand what eBay is doing.

Yet after listening to their collective 2.5 hours of content, I still did not have a sense that we were being told the whole story.  So... I've decided to investigate on my own.

A little background:  I sell in eBay's fashion category, and have experienced sales falling steadily since last fall.  I've been doing extensive maintenance on my store to address the "problems" eBay has been encouraging us to solve: larger photos, clean backgrounds, minimal text in listings, minimal html in listing descriptions, mobile optimization, SEO optimization...  If eBay suggested we do it, I sure as heck did!  And yet at best I was only able to recover about 10% of the sales volume I lost.

As you can imagine, I was ravenous for any insight Mr. Williams would provide.  Last week, I summarized the small amount of information I gleaned from the presentation.  

Sadly, Mr. Williams explicitly declined to provide anything concrete to answer what best listing practices could maximize our performance, in fact he shared a slide that said why he would NOT tell us (something about a level playing field for all sellers).  This is a departure from how eBay has always worked with sellers; eBay used to advise us of specific factors that would raise our result in search (such as offering free shipping, accepting returns, etc.).

Since they won't tell us (much), I decided to investigate for myself.  To insure my personal buying behavior was not factored into ranking results, I logged out of eBay, opened a different browser, and deleted all cookies/browsing history before proceeding.  This approach should mimic what a new-to-eBay shopper would see.

Disclaimer: My results from this study in the "Fashion" category may not be true across all categories, as Fashion does not have a catalog, ISBN, or SKU numbers to unify the items.

"Black Pencil Skirt 12"

I queried "Black Pencil Skirt 12", applied only 1 filter (Women's Clothing), and collected data on the top 100 results in Best Match.  I will be reporting back my findings over the next several blog entries.

For today, lets explore the relationship between Fixed Price and Auction rankings.  In my query, eBay found 1,219 results: 78 were Auction format (representing 6.4% of all results) and 1,141 were Fixed Price (93.6%).
I counted 36 of the top 100 were Auction listings, and 64 were Fixed Price.

Here's the exciting part:
36 Auctions items in the top 100 = 46.2% of all Auction listings. 
This means nearly half of the Auction listings appeared in the top 100 results!

This leaves the Fixed Price listings under-represented in the top 100 results, only 5.6% (64) of the Fixed Price listings appeared in the top 100 results.

Take-away:

If you sell fashion, always include Auction items in your listing mix.

In Part II of this series, I will be highlighting some jaw-dropping data on Multi-variation listings.  Stay tuned!