eBay listing tips

Ebay listing tip 1. You need to know ebay listing tips.  ebay categories: selecting the correct category in ebay is even more important than ever as ebay’s search engine “Cassini” will penalise items which are listed in the wrong categories.

Before Cassini, many sellers would list items in a category which they believed had more traffic, however Cassini uses the “impression to sale” ratio to penalise the sellers who list in the wrong category. If you are not familiar with the impression to sale ratio, here is how it works.

Ebay being a business, wants to promote the most successful listings.  The most successful listings are the listings which get the least impressions, to the highest amount of sales.

When a buyer searches for an item and presses the search button, the results are then shown. Every listing shown here is called an impression.

If a listing get shown 10 times in the search results (10 impressions), and gets one sale, this gives an impression to sale ratio of 10 to 1.

If an item is listed in the wrong category, it may get many impressions, however it will normally get very low sales compared to how many impressions it gets. Over time Cassini will penalise the listing by dropping it further and further down the search results.

Items with the best impression to sale ratios get pushed up to the top of the search results.

To find what is the best category to list an item in there are several different strategies.

First of all, have a look at which category the top sellers are using for the item you have to sell.

From the picture above, you can see this seller has chosen to list the item in two different categories.

The most effective way to choose categories is to find the most successful Seller for the product or similar product that you are selling and then look to see which category they are using.

A quick way to do this is to type in the main keyword into the ebay search bar and then look at the top five listings. This is on the proviso you have left the “best match” as your filter in the search results.

The ebay best match search results will promote the listings with the best impression to sale ratio to the top.

Another popular way to find the top seller of any item is to use Tera-peak

When you list an item, ebay will suggest a category however be very cautious with this.

Whenever you are looking at a listing like the screenshot above, if you mouse over the category, at the bottom as per the screenshot below the number of the category will appear.

Bottom line for choosing a category is to find which category the most successful sellers are using for your product. Then double check to make sure logically it appears correct and you will not be penalised by ebay.

 To your success

Neil Waterhouse