Titles and description are important on ebay - review your listings

soolin

I am on a couple of semi private collector (selling allowed) groups and occasionally a member will ask others to look at their ebay listings to see why they aren't selling, or why they have started to get some poorer feedback or stars. That's perfectly OK and within the rules of the groups I use - but it has brought up some interesting points.

Firstly, and I'm guilty of this one, leaving listings to run for months, even years without reviewing them - just hitting relist or sell similar every few months. Looking at some of my older listings, my photographs are not as good as I am currently capable of, I even have an occasional reference to something that is no longer relevant. It's difficult to give a specific example without letting on what I'm selling - but for instance - selling tea sets as 'suitable for a Royal afternoon tea party whilst you watch the Coronation' type of thing.

Looking at other listings, there was someone selling books, this is not a recent example as I don't want people searching for her, her title was usually something like 'The Times  best selling book' , 'summer reading classic' etc - but when questioned as to why she didn't actually put the title in she didn't see the point as she thought they could see the actual book once they opened the listing  and didn't want to waste her title naming the book or author.

Then last week someone selling something clearly marked with a pottery stamp like  'Poole' leaving that out of the title and description entirely and instead putting something like 'Welsh pottery cat' . When questioned- she bought it in Wales and didn't think the Poole stamp was of any notable interest to a potential buyer.

We are all guilty of writing a sharp and snappy title but omitting an important keyword- we know what we are selling and forget that there are millions of things on ebay and if we want our one thing to be seen we need to put the keywords clearly in the title- Also make use of the item specifics, if using 'sell similar' don't leave the wrong colour on size in - it can win a buyer an SNAD even if your title was correct. 

I'm sure there are lots more, but let's avoid the old favourites of things like 'ultra rare - I have 100 available'. Or antique purse, new with bar code and Top Shop label.

the_lunatic_is_in_my_head

Good advice

I'd throw in, try and have at least 3 photos (the search likes 3 or more, if they are different) and taking good photos makes all the difference, a blurry photo of an item on someone's bed is less likely to sell than a listing with 8 photos showing it's condition positioned on a nice clean table or such. If you use desktop and need to crop photos I find it quicker in paint before uploading than using eBay's cropping tool. 

Fill in the item specifics if they are relevant and use the eBay pre-defined options if you can. As an example I recently used sell similar on a DVD, the Format was DVD Box Set when it should have been DVD and the region coding was the old Region 2 rather than the current DVD: 2 (Europe, Japan, Middle East...) so nether options would have been included if a buyer filtered by the format or Region check boxes on the search.

The more Item Specifics you fill the better buyers will find you using filters and I'm sure the search likes them too. Worth a note not to spam the IS and fill in stuff that isn't relevant as you may appear in more searches (I believe the IS are searched for as well as titles) driving down the impressions to sales ratio negatively affecting the search ranking. 

If you have time I'd always pull BIN listings before they tick over and put up a new listing with relist or sell similar as doing so gives them a short boost in the search results and prevents the listings going stale and sinking to the bottom of the results.

One thing I don't understand is why people will list something worth £50 for £50 on auction over and over again, I understand the first time you might hope to get two bidders but after that I'd suggest BIN with promote your listings set at 2% and would recommend adding the standard promote to pretty every BIN listing unless it's something you know will sell first time around.

Lastly keep the P&P charges reasonable, I'm tired of seeing listings set at £3.99 for 2nd class on something that's going to be a sub 100g large letter and forget Signed For on cheap items as it's a real waste of money, either be a bit cheaper or put the extra in your pocket.

soolin said:

I'm sure there are lots more, but let's avoid the old favourites of things like 'ultra rare - I have 100 available'. Or antique purse, new with bar code and Top Shop label.

What about L@@K in the title that's got to be a good seller! 

soolin

quote "What about L@@K in the title that's got to be a good seller! "

that used to be really common and drove me to distraction .

I haven't even touched on the 'new without tags- only worn once for a couple of hours' nonsense.

I agree that postage can be a bit of an issue as well , I think some sellers need to actually review the costs before they pluck a figure out of thin air. OK add a bit on to the stamp cost for a padded envelope or small box - but don't go mad. There was someone on a forum recently who had in their listings an entire paragraph about why their postage was expensive - it included signed for with the comment, yes I know my prices are high and a lot of my items are under £2 but I'm not being ripped off by you even on a £1 item'. I have to walk to the PO and that takes me a while and I often have to go out just with one item- so I'm not doing that for free, then there's my time for packaging your item, I'm sure you wouldn't thank ,me for just chucking it in a bag ...it went on and on and on 

Spoonie_Turtle

soolin said:

 There was someone on a forum recently who had in their listings an entire paragraph about why their postage was expensive - it included signed for with the comment, yes I know my prices are high and a lot of my items are under £2 but I'm not being ripped off by you even on a £1 item'. I have to walk to the PO and that takes me a while and I often have to go out just with one item- so I'm not doing that for free, then there's my time for packaging your item, I'm sure you wouldn't thank ,me for just chucking it in a bag ...it went on and on and on 

That kind of thing makes me think they don't actually know what they're doing and will be a right pain if anything does go wrong, so yeah stuff like that definitely puts me off.

soolin

Just sitting here going through hundreds of random past auctions and listings on various sites doing some pricing research - and there's a lot out there in the wild.

If something is in a box marked Galway crystal  , perhaps sellers on here might want to hazard a guess as to the manufacturer? Only there are people who seem to think it Ok to call it  a 'lovely rare piece of Scottish glass still in original Galway Crystal box'......

I'm actually researching a specific item which I shan't mention, but there are different manufacturers , some have more value than others. I suspect some sellers are doing it on purpose, but the title says 'XX' brand, the item specific says 'YY made by XX' and the description just refers to XX brand with a comment about looking at the photo of the back stamp. The photo of the back stamp clearly shows the brand as YY.

For information YY brand is unlikely to fetch 50% of the price an XX brand would and the 2 manufacturers are totally unconnected. 

It is also not alright to refer to any random muted colour porcelain figurine as 'LLadro' . 

[Deleted User]

There's a big 'thing' being made of clothing, in this vein too.

The knitwear industry has blown up with the whole wording and description of the word 'cashmere', if you describe it ambiguously, or inaccurately, accounts are/have been deleted/removed and listings taken down by the auto-bots.

This has happened on Etsy and it could well drift across to ebay soon too as a lot of the Etsy sellers have moved across now - potentially widening the sweep of this new protocol.

soolin

[Deleted User] said:

There's a big 'thing' being made of clothing, in this vein too.

The knitwear industry has blown up with the whole wording and description of the word 'cashmere', if you describe it ambiguously, or inaccurately, accounts are/have been deleted/removed and listings taken down by the auto-bots.

This has happened on Etsy and it could well drift across to ebay soon too as a lot of the Etsy sellers have moved across now - potentially widening the sweep of this new protocol.

Clothing is not something I know a lot about but the issue around materials is interesting. A while ago I saw some lovely boots on Amazon described as ‘leather’ When I read the full description it stated leather was man made and suitable for vegans - now maybe I’m old but surely leather must come from an animal, or has the word moved on to mean a style of fabric? Ididnt buy them, I wanted proper leather.

I’ve seen ‘genuine silk’ made from polyester , ‘100% breathable pure cotton’ with polyester as the main fabric. I don’t buy clothes now without being 100% sure what the actual label says. 

I do know a bit about jewellery though, I dabble in vintage items. I am tired of ‘gold’ rings being sold without hallmarks and obviously gold coloured steel, glass ‘diamonds’ plastic ‘pearls’. 

RFW

I've been doing it for centuries now but still make rookie errors.

I just had a message asking me why something was "collection only" when I have loads of them and it can post for £1-2. I thought the customer was looking in the wrong place so I checked. I had 6 listings that were collection only, they'd been up for a week and I hadn't noticed. In my defence I'd used a 3rd party to copy some Amazon listings to Ebay but I still should have known.

As far as other things go, give as much information as possible, especially if it's mixed lots. I know many don't read descriptions but some of us do.
Also avoid cut and pasting your entire feedback in the description, as I saw earlier, it looks awful and makes little sense, I want to know what I'm buying, if I want to read your feedback, I'll find it.

The other one that puts me off buying, and is completely pointless, is "seller is not responsible for any items lost in the post". Seller is always responsible, whether you try to wriggle out of it or not.

MovingForwards

@soolin I agree about the jewellery points raised. I very recently purchased a silver 925 bracelet, it arrived and was silver tone. Tried to be nice to the seller but was met with "no returns", I'd even screenshot their advert and the packaged item to show it wasn't. Got eBay involved, rejected postage refund offer and received full refund; their listing has been updated. Still trying to work out my feedback wording on this!

There's a broach I'm interested in, shame the photos are blurred as I cannot see if it's intact and it keeps getting relisted.

I've also seen detailed explanations about postage costs and no further information about the item.