Search fundamentals and Best match
December 10, 2008
eBay held a webinar yesterday in conjunction with ChannelAdvisor covering the fundamentals of appearing in search along with hints and tips for Best Match.
eBay emphasized the difference between Search and Best Match - Search determines which products are selected based on the keywords a buyer searches for. Sellers need to understand what terms buyers use and include popular alternatives in 55 character title. (eg motorcycle/motorbike). Good keywords, along with selecting the best category and item specifics, will avoid your item being filtered out of search results before they’re sorted by Best Match.
Once a set of search results is found they are then sorted with Best Match. For auctions the only criteria for Best Match are DSRs (4.4 or above to avoid demotion) and Ending Soonest.
Fixed price items are sorted in Best Match on a combination of factors which vary by category. Best Match responds to recent buying patterns so it evolves according to which combination of sorting criteria is working best for that particular category, including Recent Sales, title relevance, 30 day DSRs and price.
Recent Sales is the most important factor but does vary by category. Where few multi-quantity items are listed then the title and price become more important. Time ending soonest is not a factor for sorting fixed price items in Best match. If Recent Sales, DSRs and the title can’t distinguish between listings then price becomes the deciding factor in determining the sort order.
The price used in Best Match does not include P&P but reasonable charges will help keep DSRs high and avoid demotion. If any of your DSRs fall below 4.4 then both auctions and BINs are demoted.
Don’t split sales across multiple listings - from January you’ll only be allowed one fixed price listing for each product line you sell. Gaining sales on a single listing over the Christmas period will put you ahead of any competitors still running multiple listings for each product and in a months time they’ll have no listings with large numbers of recent sales.
Recent Sales boosts will be lost when you relist if you: Increase the start price; change the category; change the title; change the item condition. You can add to the item description, but not change existing description.
Ideas for driving sales include using Best Offer or MarkDown Manager for pricing promotions and using Featured First and Featured Plus to increase visibility.
One final tip which is a new one to me, Item Specifics are used to determine which products are returned in search results. If you’re selling a shirt and you specify “Denim” as the fabric but don’t have it in the item title it will be included in searches for “Denim Shirt”. However when Best Match sorts the search results it does not use Item Specifics. This means a shirt with Denim in item specifics may not be considered as relevant as one that has Denim in the actual title. Although Item Specifics are useful for appearing in search it’s still the keywords in the title that are the most important.
eBay Search and Finding has changed beyond all recognition over the last year but the fundamentals remain the same: Use good keywords, fill out all available fields including item specifics, select the most appropriate category and price competitively, provide top quality service to your buyers and pretty much everything else will take care of itself.
Optimising search & finding webinar
December 2, 2008
Two of eBay UK’s top search managers are hosting a webinar, Jay Spanton, Finding Manager, and Mark Davis, Best Match Manager will both speak at the event co-hosted by ChannelAdvisor.
The event takes place on Tuesday 9th December at 3.00pm and will cover hints and tips on Best Match as well as the fundamentals of appearing in search with time for Q&A.
If you want to know why your product isn’t appearing in search, or why a competitors product is placed above yours in Best Match this is where you can get the answers from the people that manage the site.
eBay France include popularity in Best Match
October 3, 2008
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
Best Match: what’s in, what’s out
September 24, 2008
Earlier this week, eBay answered some members’ questions about Best Match and related search issues. There isn’t much we don’t already know, but it’s nice to have it all in one place (even if the eBay rep. turned up half an hour late for a one hour discussion).
For BINs, Best Match is now the default search sorting. Auctions will continue to be sorted by ending soonest by default, with sellers with a DSR of 4.3 or lower “disadvantaged” in search. eBay are coy about exactly what criteria are taken into account with BM and what importance is given to each. The exact algorithm will vary according to category: for one example, many collectables categories are concerned with one-offs, so popularity (i.e. number of items already sold) is not going to be a meaningful criterion. BM criteria are also likely to be fine-tuned over time, so don’t assume that what works for you this week will necessarily work next week.
However, we do know that at the moment, popularity is more important than price, because “a higher-priced popular item will rank better than a lower-priced unpopular one”. Additionally “importance will be placed on good DSRs, recent sales (in categories where multi quantity listing is prevalent), good value and relevant item titles.” As eBay have said that “total cost” is not a factor in BM, it’s not quite clear what “good value” might mean: item price, or distance from category average price, are two possibilities that spring to mind, but these are just my guesses. The matching of keywords between search query and item title is taken into account with Best Match, so well-written titles remain as crucial as ever.
Sellers who list single items can relist a sold listing within seven days in order to benefit from the recent sales rating and so improve their BM ranking. They will need to actually “relist” the same listing to achieve this; “sell similar” will reset their recent sales rating.
We also have a list of what BM does not take into account:
- seller status (private or business)
- seller’s total sold items
- postage costs being specified
- returns policy being specified
- feedback percentage
- item specifics
- total cost
- item description
However, both item specifics and item description are important in ensuring your item is actually picked up by search in the first place, so don’t skimp on either.
eBay UK will not be hiding duplicated items from the same seller, a process known as “deduping” on eBay.com. Now that popularity boosts search ranking, eBay believe that there will be fewer duplicated single item listings, and more multiple items listed together; deduping is therefore unnecessary.
My concern in all this, as ever, is what it’s doing to the buyers. Consider this explanation of how auction and BIN results will finally be sorted together:
Auction and BIN items will be sorted according to two different sets of criteria (time ending soonest and DSR scores for auction, and a mix of trust, value and popularity for BIN). Once the items for each format are sorted, the two separate lists are blended together based on buyer behaviour and can vary for category and query.
Buyers have spent the last decade and more learning to buy at the last minute on eBay: it’s such ingrained behaviour that they do it on BINs even though it makes no sense. And now, at the busiest, spendiest time of the year, we’re asking them to abandon those habits and deal with a new sort order that frankly looks just random. eBay talk a lot about the buyer experience, but when they pile these changes onto them, one after another, tweaking site functionality on a weekly basis, I wonder if they’re thinking of them at all.
Amazon, eBay and finding
September 15, 2008
Amazon and eBay have two quite different solutions to assist buyers to find the product they’re looking for. Up until now eBay have relied on ending soonest, a lottery of which product happens to be at the top of search results at the time the buyer happens to search. Amazon in contrast present just one listing for each product with the best price/availability highlighted to the buyer.
eBay is about to change radically to present products based on Best Match, a complicated algorithm including relevancy, prices, feedback and soon popularity as judged by recent sales. (It’s worth spending five minutes to read eBay’s best match patent). eBay’s biggest issue is how to present the most relevant item a buyer is searching for, out of many instances of the same product.
Amazon’s radically different approach has always made relevancy easy. With only one listing (known as the ‘Detail page’) for each product, price/availability/seller reputation are all that’s needed to present the best item to the buyer. Even here though there are issues such as the way that listings are created.
On Amazon the first person to sell a particular item creates the detail page with the picture and description. The product will be assigned an Amazon Standard Identification Number (ASIN) which all other sellers of the same item will then list against.
In the future other sellers may update the product information, the decision about whether or not to display any changes is processed automatically according to automated business logic known as ‘ASIN Authority’. The information displayed on an Amazon detail page is drawn from multiple seller contributions based on this logic and so the information the buyer sees is a collaboration of different sellers listings.
This ‘Wisdom of the Crowds’ approach brings with it it’s own problems. You may have listed a particular product against an ASIN when another seller with makes edits to the detail page. This could then result in selling an item you don’t possess due to the changes made by another seller. With a large inventory it may not be until buyers start to receive their items that the change is revealed.
Amazon advise that because the product details for an item are drawn from multiple sources, it is your responsibility as a Merchant on Amazon to continually monitor your listings for accuracy.
eBay and Amazon’s approaches to displaying the most relevant items to buyer both have their flaws. In the future eBay’s will rely heavily on displaying listings from the best sellers with the most relevant products, but each seller will be in control of their descriptions and are able to ensure accuracy. Amazon ensure every item detail page for every product has the same information in the same place, but this can produce mis-matched products as contributions from multiple sellers (including Amazon themselves) are rationalised into one detail page.
The next few weeks as eBay roll out 30 day listings with recent sales influencing search results will be interesting. With sellers able to ensure product descriptions are 100%, eBay should have an advantage over Amazon on accuracy. If the search result page produce a similar set of sellers to Amazon’s detail page, ranked on price/availability/seller reputation then buyers finding experience will be much improved.
How to use BayEstimator for Best Match
April 23, 2008
Best Match takes into account many factors, but this article looks purely at how the “BayEstimate” value of keywords are calculated.
For those that haven’t noticed the BayEstimate tool has been reinstated, but with varying size dots to represent the positive or negative impact of words in your title (instead of percentages). Even if you’ve used the tool before it’s worth reading the instructions and FAQ as it’s changed yet again since it’s relaunch two days ago on the 21st April.
For the purposes of the article I decided to use the Flip Video Camera I’ve just received.
How to generate a keyword rich title using BayEstimate
The Flip is not a product that I’m familiar with and I’ve done no research on good keywords so it was a great way to show BayEstimator tool at its best.
Starting off with the product name “Flip Video” and the colour “Orange” I entered them into the BayEstimator. That gave four search keyword options, so I picked the most relevant to my title which was “Flip Video”. The BayEstimator then presents an ordered list of Keywords buyers like/dislike when searching for “Flip Video” shown left.
Instantly without knowing too much about the product I can quickly add in keywords to build the title “FLIP VIDEO ULTRA DIGITAL CAMCORDER 2GB 60 MIN ORANGE”.
Ultra is the model of the camera and although I missed that BayEstimate didn’t. Interestingly “60 MIN” is a better keyword selection that “60 MINUTES”, which is the record time for this model. This can be shown by the title I’ve generated with BayEstimate and the second title which is a live listing on eBay.
Using the word “Digital” in favour of “Minutes” makes a difference to the title’s overall attractiveness to Best Match. It should be realised that as Best Match learns which keywords are associated with the search term, in this case “Flip Video”, it will start to disadvantage titles which contain “Minutes”, even though it’s a valid descriptor.
Another interesting point is that the word “New” is more important than the colour “Orange”. Using a gallery picture buyers can see that your product is orange so omit it from your title and use new instead.
Finally if you are going to use keywords that will disadvantage your title in search, BayEstimator will clearly indicate which words you should omit from your titles.
How BayEstimate and Best Match work
Each keyword in eBay item titles is given a “desirability percentage”, although BayEstimator now only displays different sized/coloured dots indication rather than a percentage. Reading eBay’s patent application for Best Match (officially known as “Determining relevancy and desirability of terms.”) reveals more about how Best Match desirability is calculated.
The desirability percentage is calculated based on the most clicked keywords in item titles in relation to the search term (e.g. for the purpose of the exercise above it should be assumed that the buyer searched for “Flip Video”.) Having been presented with the search results Best Match then determines which additional keywords in the title are most likely to best describe the item the buyer is searching for.
When a user searches eBay notes the words in every title of every listing returned in the result and especially the words in the title that users tend to click on. For example if in 1000 searches for “Flip Video” titles including the word “Camcorder” were clicked on 900 times then “Camcorder” would have a desirability of 90% when coupled with “Flip Video”. Equally the product comes with a case, if the word “Case” was in just 50 titles that buyers clicked on then it would have a desirability of just 5%.
On a rolling basis eBay can keep track of which keywords are considered by buyers as highly relevant when coupled with search terms. When scanning a page of titles if buyers eyes are drawn to one particular word (and tend to click on titles containing that word) then it will be considered highly relevant. Equally if a keyword is present in a large proportion of titles on the page, but is selected much less frequently then it will be considered undesirable.
The effect of this would be when searching for “Flip Video”, titles including “Records for 60 minutes” would probably not appear at the top (and maybe not even on the first page) of search results.
Conclusions
The return of the BayEstimate tool has given sellers the ability to fine tune their titles and under Best Match this becomes more important than in the past. Previously regardless of title your listings would rise to the top under ending soonest. With Best Match your listings will live or die with judicious keyword selection. Also, as buyers will automatically modify Best Match desirability by clicking on search results, sellers will need to modify titles on an ongoing basis to ensure they’re remain at the top of the relevancy tables.
Sellers should also remember that keyword selection in item titles is just a part of the Best Match algorithm. Feedback, feedback DSRs, the length of time left to run on the listing, geographic proximity to the buyer, the number of bids already made, Auction/Buy It Now, INR disputes and even pictures can affect your items ranking.
Best Matched title keywords are a part of the picture, but if your titles are better matched than competitors, all other things being equal, then your listings will float to the top above theirs in search.
How to game the Best Match search algorithm
April 16, 2008
Best Match has hardly began its roll out in the UK, but in the US where it’s already live things are getting interesting. The big question is can it be gamed, and the answer is a resounding “Yes”.
The back story is that Raghav Gupta, an eBay developer, published a tool called BayEstimate. This was an incredibly useful tool which would assign a relevancy score to each word in your listing title. This enabled you to omit less relevant words and add in suggested highly relevant keywords. When first released it used data that was about a year old but was then enabled to use live data, as recent as March 2008, from the eBay site.
Sellers began to experiment and found that including a single keyword multiple times could push your listing to the top of Best Match results. eBay Strategies carries an interview with the seller credited with discovering and exploiting the way to hack Best Match.
eBay reacted by requesting that the Research Labs take down the BayEstimate tool which they have done, but this is no surprise. Back on 25th March during a PeSA educational conference call on Best Match Jeff King, who leads the finding team at eBay, was somewhat surprised the tool was available and warned eBay might disable it.
No doubt eBay will now build into Best Match a way of lowering the relevance of repeated keywords, so what can sellers do for the future? The advice, to be honest, is much the same as it’s always been although more important as listings under Best Match sort will never have the advantage of rising to the top as they would under sort by Ending Soonest. Reading eBay’s patent application for Best Match reveals the following tips to maximise exposure for your listings:
- Make sure your titles are filled with relevant keywords and use all the available characters.
- If Item Specifics are available for your item use them. Best Match should take these into account even if they’re not in your item title
- Use eBay Pulse to establish the most searched for words in the category you’re listing in
- If you have an eBay shop use Traffic Reports (Finding Methods > Search keywords) to establish the most searched for terms for your own eBay shop. These are especially powerful as it reveals the search engine used, whether this be eBay or an external site such as Google).
- Include pictures in all listings, and use the Gallery listing upgrade
- Keep your postage at (or below) average for the category you’re listing in
- Finally do a search for your product using Best Match, look at the titles that are at the top and check if they have keywords that your title is missing. Learn from the listings that are already highly ranked.
There are other contributing factors to Best Match such as feedback DSRs, the length of time left to run on the listing, geographic proximity to the buyer, the number of bids already made (consider auctions with 99p no reserve where appropriate) and whether the listing has Buy It Now available.
The final factor taken into account on Best Match is of course feedback, including DSRs, Negative and Neutrals, and any Item Not Received Disputes registered against your account.
Sellers of long tail products will have an advantage simply because there is less competition when a buyer searches eBay. If you’re selling common products you have to compete with multiple sellers but selling rare items may result in your listing being the only one, or one of very few matching a buyers search terms. Even for common products it’s often possible to list them using less common keywords, I recommend duplicate listings, one with a standard title and multiple duplicates (possibly even low cost SIF listings) with much more specific keywords in the titles.
It’s been proven that it is possible to game (hack?) the Best Match algorithm and eBay will doubtless do everything in their power to prevent this. However the simplest way to ensure your listings are highly ranked may be to follow the guidelines above making your listings highly relevant to buyers.
Have you got any more tips on how to rank highly under Best Match? If so let us know in comments below.
eBay UK tests new search results’ display
March 6, 2008
eBay UK have just announced tests of their new layout for the search results pages. From Sunday, 10% of users will see the new pages. We were allowed a sneaky peek, and I have to say, I’m seriously impressed.
Firstly, Best Match has become the default search sort. Though it’s nerve-wracking for sellers to have this radical change to how buyers find us, looking at what happened to my sales on eBay.fr when Best Match came in last year, I’ve got to be in favour of it. (We’ll be looking more at Best Match and how sellers can optimise for it in the next week or two.) Other search options remain available though: ending first, newly listed, by price etc. are all there on the drop down menu, or users can customise the default setting to their own preferred option.
The big change for eBay users is that it is now very easy to filter through hundreds of results to find what you want, without having to resort to punctuational cleverness in the search box. The days of having to type skirt (Monsoon, Per Una) -pink -orange are gone: you can just choose “skirts” and filter down from there, by size, colour, price, style, new or preworn, BIN or auction, and so on and and so on. Clickable categories in the left hand menu are obvious and easy to use, and more advanced users can bring up a whole window where they can select any combination of multiple options.
Sellers will need to use item specifics to get their items properly included in these narrow searches, though buyers do have the option to include “not specified” items in their results. I predict that “not specified” item specifics are going to be the new “misspelled titles”: a great way to bag a bargain for those who don’t mind doing a little extra digging.
If the options you’ve chosen yield too few results, it’s easy to remove search criteria one by one; just click the red cross from the top to get rid of them.
And if you still have too many items to choose from, you can add more keywords with the “narrow this search” box. This flexibility should make finding on eBay a much easier experience in future.
But my favourite change is in the display of search results. List View is what we have now, with gallery on the left and customisable item information displayed beside it. Picture Gallery display emphasises Gallery pictures and shows limited item information below them.
My preferred option, though, will undoubtedly be Window Shopping. This shows only the gallery pictures, with more information (title, price etc) and a bigger picture available as a pop-up when you mouse over the picture. Though this is only an option, never the default presentation, I predict it’ll be very popular with buyers in the pretty categories: what better way to skim through looking for your perfect skirt, earrings or packet of beads?
eBay have provided special help section on the new search features, but I don’t think anyone’s going to need it. It all feels very intuitive and easy. More than that, it feels fun. Elements like the colour and price sliders are simple but innovative, and look a bit more interesting than all the tickable option boxes. I really like this, and I think my buyers will too.
If you’re one of the 10% testing this from Sunday, leave us your thoughts in the comments.
eBay UK introduce total price searching
January 29, 2008
eBay UK have just announced the introduction of two new search sort criteria: “Price + P&P: Lowest First†and “Price + P&P: Highest Firstâ€. These, as you might guess, sort listings by total price including postage. The intention is to disadvantage sellers who list very low prices with very high postage, avoiding eBay fees and frequently misleading buyers into thinking they’re getting a great deal.
Sellers are advised to include at least one postage option in the P&P fields of their listing (not just specified within the listing description) because those who don’t list postage prices at all will be displayed lower in these search results.
Buyers and sellers alike have been asking for this feature for years, so I’m very happy to see it finally happen.
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