Posts Tagged ‘ebay best match’

eBay Best Match: Is Your Product A Needle?

eBay is saturated with products and if your search standing is not up to par your products are literally a needle in a ebay-best-matchhaystack and will never be found by anyone.

How do you know if your product is a hot eBay product if potential buyers can’t even see your eBay listing?

People who buy from eBay generally search eBay in 2 ways.

They will type in a search term into the browser and hit the search button. eBay automatically shows best match items first but then they will chose the ‘show products with lowest price and shipping first’. Basically they are searching for the lowest priced product. It’s not a good thing to try and succeed by only listing the lowest cost products because someone else will inevitably be willing to work for less than you and eventually they will undercut your prices and you will be working for peanuts!

The second way people search eBay is with best match. To be found in eBay best match you need good feedback, good dsr ratings, an optimized eBay title and a product that sells when clicked on. Free shipping also helps.

But how the heck can you get sales in the first place to get a good search standing?

My eBay Best Match Boost Tutorial shows you a way to get around a low search standing but another simple way is to use the lowest price search on one or two of your lowest priced products to get traffic into your store.

If you sell a lot of a lower priced product you probably wont make much profit from those sales however, your search standing will increase for all your products. That includes any new products you list.

If your new higher priced products do sell well, your new listings will stay near the top of eBay best match search results and usually on the first page in a smaller niche category.

If your product continues to sell well, it might even appear on the first page of the search results in the ‘next level up’ category (the parent category), and that’s when you’ll get lots more sales.

Is the eBay category your selling in flooded with competition? Tell me by posting a message below..

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eBay Best Match, Questioning eBay’s Head Office How It Works

Recently I was invited to attend a telephone conference and put a few questions to some of the heads of the eBay Best Match European Team and I asked a couple of awkward questions about eBay best match tips and ebay-best-match-algorythmeBay best match optimization. Some of the main points I will mention here.

How does the eBay best match work?

If you are ‘tech savvy’ you will know that search engines operate based on a mathematical formula namely an algorithm and eBay’s best match search is no different.

Key factors that influence eBay Best Match Optimization

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  • Free shipping helps. Buyers like to see free shipping and eBay’s again rewards listings with free shipping. Yes if you include your shipping costs in your selling price you will pay a percentage to eBay in fees. eBay say “The amount of extra sales you generate by using free shipping will offset the small increase in the amount of fees you pay”
  • It was confirmed that Feedback percentage is not as important as Dsr’s when it comes to determining search standing in eBay best match. High dsr ratings and seller status will affects search standing more than your feedback percentage.
  • Keywords are important. Do not include any keywords in the title which are irrelevant to the product. If your listing obtains more search impressions and the buyer is not looking for that particular product this will have a negative effect on search standing.
  • DO, include as many laser targeted relevant keywords in the title as possible. Basically anything that a buyer would type in to buy the exact product you are selling. For example people looking for Ipods are not looking for ipod skins so you would not include the word skins in your listing title and vise versa.

Some of the main points which came directly from the horses mouth (Tom Wagstaffe from eBay’s European best match team) are summarized here;

  • Sales history is important, listings with more recent sales get more best match points
  • The number of search impressions divided by the number of sales a listing receives is important. The eBay best match algorithm calculates a conversion rate for every buy it now listing. When a potential buyer types in a relevant keyword into the eBay search bar, every time a listing is displayed on the search page it gets an impression count. If the buyer clicks through and buys the product then that counts as a sale. Suppose your listing had 50 search impressions and generated 2 sales from those impressions, the conversion rate would be calculated like this;

(Number of Sales) ÷ (Search Impressions) x 100 = (conversion rate percentage)

2 Sales ÷ 50 Search Impressions x 100 = conversion rate of  4%

Listings with higher conversion percentages receive more eBay best match brownie points and the eBay Best Match Boost listing strategy shows you exactly how to make your buy it now listing conversion rates soar.

Anyone who grabs a copy of the eBay Best Match Boost listing strategy will also get to download the complete 50 minute conference call on MP3, where I get to ask a couple of questions confirming these key points with eBay’s top dogs. On this MP3, Tom Wagstaffe from eBay’s head office also reveals insider information on how to make sure you’re an eBay best match maverick!

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