Wholesale Tips & Advice

April 8th, 2013

Optimising Listings for Best Match on eBay

As every eBay retailer already knows, the world’s favourite auction site is an incredibly competitive marketplace. This means that it’s often necessary to employ a few tricks if you want to become a Power Seller on the platform, something that in itself carries numerous benefits.

So what’s the best route to take to increase sales, bearing this in mind? Achieving a high position in eBay’s Best Match search results is a very good start. However, if you’re starting from scratch, this is easier said than done, a lot of the time.

Tips for attaining a good listing

By optimising one or two listings, this can benefit the remainder of your listings significantly and help to achieve more sales. Bearing this in mind, it’s necessary first to look at how search results are sorted.

  • Buy it Now and fixed price items are based on seller performance, sales and recent impressions in search
  • Title, value and P&P all affect how your listings appear in search
  • Top rated sellers gain better Best Match results

Given that 80% of buyers on eBay don’t alter search results by further defining once they are returned, it’s easy to see why ensuring your listing are optimised is important.

Seller performance

We all recognise the importance of feedback on eBay, as this measures the performance of the trader. In order to ensure that you gain the best feedback possible, product quality, customer service and timely dispatch are paramount.

Tips for improving performance include:

  • Speed up dispatch times by streamlining your pick and pack methods
  • Create a universal template for each product type so that you can create powerful, comprehensive listings which tell the customer exactly what they are buying
  • Answer queries as quickly as possible, have a timeframe in place for staff to work to so that everything is clear
  • Have a process in place to deal with complaints such as missing items and returns so that these can be dealt with speedily

Recent sales history

Rather than creating a listing for identical, individual products, group them together in one listing. This will improve the search position of that listing and if you then go on to restock the same listing, rather than creating a new one, this will let you build on the sales numbers for that particular item.

This can be achieved by using the ‘Good ‘Til Cancelled’ function, which means that the item will automatically be relisted every 30 days. This builds the sales history over the lifetime of the listing and allows for better search positioning.

Titles

Just like any other internet-based ecommerce, eBay listings perform better if they use keywords. Use BayEstimator to research keywords and use these to build effective titles.

However, don’t be tempted to use keywords that are competitive but not relevant to your product, as this is likely to affect search positioning in a negative manner. Have a good look around at your competitors to see what keywords they are using and common but effective abbreviations that are often used and will be picked up in search.

Free P&P

Offering free P&P will automatically boost your results in Best Match, so this is something to factor into pricing in the first instance. However, it’s important to remain good value when compared to others in your industry so bear this in mind.

If your margins are too tight to offer free P&P, then ensure that postage rates are reasonable, offer discounts for more than one item and offer more than one shipping option to gain better results.

To automate the process and save time across all of your internet sales points, such as Amazon and eBay, think about using software like SellerExpress to help with speeding up optimisation.

In order to gain a great reputation, become a Power Seller and succeed on eBay, it’s necessary to offer good quality products, great prices, superb customer service and complete transparency about the company and what it has to offer.

Get all of this right and you’re well on the way to becoming a successful online trader.

Products

Having the correct products is crucial to any business. At A & K Hosiery we have a fantastic range of products available to you. All items are priced competitively meaning you can offer low trade prices to your customers whilst still enjoying a healthy profit for yourself.

Be sure to check out our range of wholesale bags, wholesale hats and wholesale footwear. New products are added to our range every week meaning you can offer a fantastic a fresh selection!

A & K Hosiery’s wholesale tips & advice is free whether you buy from us or not! Hopefully you will find it informative and helpful.

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This entry was posted on Monday, April 8th, 2013 at 12:34 pm and is filed under Tips & Advice, Wholesale Hats. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.