Featured

Being at the top of eBay’s Best Match is a little akin to winning the blue Buy Box on Amazon, the listings at the top of eBay’s Best Match are starting to attract the lions share of the sales.

Some experimentation over the last week has revealed some great strategies to ensure your listing is at, or near, the top of search results. Best of all many of the tactics won’t cost you a penny to implement.

Recent sales are the surest way to gain exposure for your listing. The big question is how do you kick start sales to get to the top, especially if other seller’s listings have had sales already? Here are my 7 top tips to gain Recent Sales including two ways auctions can be used to boost a BIN listing’s visibility in search results:

1) Featured First

Featured First is the only sure fire way to the top of search results but it’s going to cost you (£44.95 for up to ten days, £134.95 for up to 30 days). Featured First is a great way to buy exposure but, as it’s success starts to be seen, more and more sellers are starting to use the listing enhancement.

If you’re one of just two sellers to use Featured First in a category then you’ll always be at the top, but as more sellers start to use the feature you listing will appear in a rotation and the exposure starts to fall.

This is a feature that should only ever be used once on a listing with good run rate, and then recent sales should be keeping you at the top of search. However, for slower sell through rate, high value items, Featured First is definitely worth considering on an ongoing basis.

2) Auctions to drive sales

Yes auctions are old hat, as a seller you probably prefer to know you’ll get the price you want and many buyers want to buy instantly rather than bid. Well that might be the case but auctions are still sorted using Ending Soonest and are still a great route to getting your listings to the top of search results.

Auctions at an attractive start prices will get buyers looking, strong links from auctions are a great way to kick start some sales on your main BIN listings. Look at the auction as a loss leader to gain attention and drive traffic from the auction to your BIN. Also consider trying an auction with a BIN price for an instant sale because….

3) Auction to Recent Sales Advantaged BIN

… It’s possible to gain a Recent Sales advantage in Best Match from an auction and this is the main reason sellers should be experimenting with the listing format. If your auction sells at a final value price that you’d be willing to sell at (or below), relist it but convert it to a BIN.

In testing it appears that Recent Sales advantage is transferred from a sold auction to a new BIN listing and can propel the BIN towards the top of Best Match at best, and above an identical BIN listing with no sales at worst. Auctions can be used to actively gain a head start for a multi-quantity BIN.

4) Best Offer

On your first listing of a new product always add Best Offer. It only takes a few sales to make a huge difference in search results standings. Some experimentation with this tactic has thrown up some interesting trends, the most significant of which is that early sales will tend to be Best Offers, but once an item reaches the top of search results buyers start to buy at the full price rather than making further Best Offers.

It’s well worth accepting the first one or two offers at less than you’d normally consider, in order to boost your listing in search results. Offers are worth accepting even if you make a slight loss on a couple of sales - it’s still probably still cheaper than paying for Featured First, to get to the top of the page.

5) Email Marketing

Get smart about your email marketing, use it to drive traffic to the listings you want to sell. Use emails to highlight new listings that you need to gain Recent Sales to increase Best Match placement.
Read more »

CLD

For the entire month of October, eBay Ireland are offering free insertion fees for car auctions. The offer applies to the Cars subcategory of Cars, Parts & Vehicles, and to auction listings only. The basic auction insertion fee, normally €9, is being waived; all other fees apply as normal. BINs and classified ads are not eligible, though it’s not absolutely clear whether auction-with-BIN is excluded too, or whether those listings will just be charged the BIN upgrade fee.

From 6th to 10th October, eBay Italy are offering 75% off the price of 7-day Subito In Vetrina (a.k.a. Featured First). The offer is open to sellers with all four 12-month DSR scores at 4.3 or more. All other fees apply as normal.

eBay Australia are offering a 50% discount to PowerSellers who list with free shipping between Wednesday 8th and Tuesday 14th October.

The Aussie site has recently launched a new Free Postage Hub and qualifying items will be included in the hub.

eBay point out “We know this may not work for everyone, but if you’ve never tried offering free postage before, this is the perfect opportunity to test it out on a few items and see how you go. Who knows, you could just boost your sales and soon be listing all your items with free postage!”

Free post is definitely a selling tactic all sellers should experiment with, it can produce great results, especially if your competitors aren’t offering free post.

eBay Canada are holding a cheap listing day on 23rd September. Insertion fees for auctions only are reduced to 5c, so long as you’re a Canadian-resident seller, and you specify shipping prices. Media items, which have their own fee tariff, are also included.

Site Changes

eBay France have announced that popularity is to be included as a factor when calculating Best Match scores for Buy It Now items. Popularity is the number of items sold from a multiple item listing over the preceding seven days; the score remains valid for seven days after the end of a listing. Listings which have sold more individual items will be advantaged in Best Match search sorting (the default on eBay.fr) above those which have sold fewer.

eBay give some advice for sellers to take advantage of this:

• sellers should list single multiple-item listings instead of running many listings just for one item
• sellers should relist sold items within seven days to take advantage of their established popularity
• sellers should use longer listings - 10 days - to gain greater visibility for their item
• sellers listing auctions needn’t make any change: their listings will continue to be sorted by ending soonest

It’s good to see this change announced openly, and in detail: other eBay sites could certainly learn something from eBay.fr here. But even more than on eBay UK, I think this goes against buyer psychology on eBay France: I’ve done some fairly extensive testing of multiple listings versus single item listings, and my own experience is:

• single item listings are more likely to sell than not
• two items listed together have about an even chance of selling one of them
• more than two items are unlikely to sell anything.

French buyers, in comparison to their British counterparts, really do lack a sense of urgency: I had an email this morning regarding an item I sold in June, asking if I had another one. So I really don’t want to start telling buyers I have plenty of stock of anything: I want them to think I only have one and if they don’t buy it now, they’re going to miss out. Hammering home the scarcity message really seems to be the way forward on eBay.fr. I’ll be using the seven day relist window as much as I can, but I’ll also be running some tests to see if eBay’s multiple item listing suggestion really does work. Can they overturn more than a decade’s worth of buyer psychology in one little site change? It’ll be interesting to find out.*

* or it would be, if half my income wasn’t riding on it

Selling Tips

Being at the top of eBay’s Best Match is a little akin to winning the blue Buy Box on Amazon, the listings at the top of eBay’s Best Match are starting to attract the lions share of the sales.

Some experimentation over the last week has revealed some great strategies to ensure your listing is at, or near, the top of search results. Best of all many of the tactics won’t cost you a penny to implement.

Recent sales are the surest way to gain exposure for your listing. The big question is how do you kick start sales to get to the top, especially if other seller’s listings have had sales already? Here are my 7 top tips to gain Recent Sales including two ways auctions can be used to boost a BIN listing’s visibility in search results:

1) Featured First

Featured First is the only sure fire way to the top of search results but it’s going to cost you (£44.95 for up to ten days, £134.95 for up to 30 days). Featured First is a great way to buy exposure but, as it’s success starts to be seen, more and more sellers are starting to use the listing enhancement.

If you’re one of just two sellers to use Featured First in a category then you’ll always be at the top, but as more sellers start to use the feature you listing will appear in a rotation and the exposure starts to fall.

This is a feature that should only ever be used once on a listing with good run rate, and then recent sales should be keeping you at the top of search. However, for slower sell through rate, high value items, Featured First is definitely worth considering on an ongoing basis.

2) Auctions to drive sales

Yes auctions are old hat, as a seller you probably prefer to know you’ll get the price you want and many buyers want to buy instantly rather than bid. Well that might be the case but auctions are still sorted using Ending Soonest and are still a great route to getting your listings to the top of search results.

Auctions at an attractive start prices will get buyers looking, strong links from auctions are a great way to kick start some sales on your main BIN listings. Look at the auction as a loss leader to gain attention and drive traffic from the auction to your BIN. Also consider trying an auction with a BIN price for an instant sale because….

3) Auction to Recent Sales Advantaged BIN

… It’s possible to gain a Recent Sales advantage in Best Match from an auction and this is the main reason sellers should be experimenting with the listing format. If your auction sells at a final value price that you’d be willing to sell at (or below), relist it but convert it to a BIN.

In testing it appears that Recent Sales advantage is transferred from a sold auction to a new BIN listing and can propel the BIN towards the top of Best Match at best, and above an identical BIN listing with no sales at worst. Auctions can be used to actively gain a head start for a multi-quantity BIN.

4) Best Offer

On your first listing of a new product always add Best Offer. It only takes a few sales to make a huge difference in search results standings. Some experimentation with this tactic has thrown up some interesting trends, the most significant of which is that early sales will tend to be Best Offers, but once an item reaches the top of search results buyers start to buy at the full price rather than making further Best Offers.

It’s well worth accepting the first one or two offers at less than you’d normally consider, in order to boost your listing in search results. Offers are worth accepting even if you make a slight loss on a couple of sales - it’s still probably still cheaper than paying for Featured First, to get to the top of the page.

5) Email Marketing

Get smart about your email marketing, use it to drive traffic to the listings you want to sell. Use emails to highlight new listings that you need to gain Recent Sales to increase Best Match placement.
Read more »