If you have been selling on eBay for a while, you might have realized that your listings are constantly changing its placements. Today your listing might be at the top and then 2 months later, you are on 3rd or 4th page of the platform. Unless you are selling collectibles or true antique/vintage items, you’re really competing for every penny! A seller selling same item for $99.99 and another selling for $99.89, the second seller mostly gets the sale even if the difference is just 10 cents or even if it’s a penny, unless the reviews on the other are extremely low. So, how can you really increase your sales on a platform that’s so competitive? Let’s dive into some tips and tricks that will help you stand out and really get on good side of eBay’s algorithm.
1. Sell on eBay. But, Also Buy From Them!
eBay doesn’t only love when you sell on their platform, the algorithm will heavily favor you if you also buy from them! Now, this doesn’t mean you keep spending money on there but think about whenever you are buying something from any platform if it may be available on eBay such as shipping supplies, electronics, etc. Try to spend that money through eBay instead and you will slowly start to see change.
2. Update! Update Daily!
Similar to buying activity, any other activity you do related to your listings will get your listing on the top constantly. You might even realize that sometimes as you are updating your listings, you end up getting a sale because you are constantly active on eBay. Even if you don’t have any updates to make, simply go to your listings and make a simple change such as adding a comma or a note to description. This simple change – more often you make – more active your shop is seen by eBay.
3. Write Tempting Product Titles
Your product listing is one of the first thing that customer sees when they are searching for a product. If you can make the title tempting enough, then you are that much closer to a sale. Here are few things you need to do to really make your titles attractive:
1) Do not use ALL CAPS. People don’t write reading ALL CAPS and it may come off as too aggressive as well.
2) Add some adjectives if you can: New, Special, Discounted, Authentic, Antique, Limited, etc. These will help not only describe your product but also help persuade your potential customer on clicking on the title.
3) Keep your first 5-7 words your main “Keywords” that you are targeting. You can use a software such as Terapeak or just search for your item on eBay and see what comes up.
This will help you see what keywords people are searching using. Remember, try not to focus on short-tail keywords such as “jewelry” or “pearl necklace” – these are very common searches and will cause your listing to compete among very high competitive keywords. Instead, focus on long-tail keywords such as “Nissan Altima catalytic converter”, “silver polished cross necklace”, “thank you greeting card”, etc.
3) If you have the budget to do so, add a subtitle! This is where you get another chance to really draw attention of your customers to why your listing is better. A lot of people use this to state things like “Free Shipping from USA!”, “Brand New With Certificate of Authenticity!”. You can also add things like additional details about parts number, model number, added features and such. Some great ideas are to add more adjectives such as “Trusted by customers since 1999”, “Over 5000+ sold, Best Quality”, “Authenticity and Quality Is Our Focus”. Use this to really catch your customer’s attention. Think about how your listing can stand out.
Before we go any further, let’s talk about Terapeak a bit more. Terapeak has been acquired by eBay and is really a huge database of eBay sales and it’s FREE to store subscribers from Basic to Enterprise or you can subscribe for $12 / $19 per month. If you are looking to see which products are being sold the most, research new products and want to see what great listings look like – this is a really great tool to utilize. It will help you see what a certain product’s minimum, average, maximum price has been – how much people are buying it, supply and demand, etc.
4) Who Reads Description?
You will hear a lot of sellers say that people are not really reading descriptions. This may be true for most of the customers – but if you are selling items that are expensive (by expensive, I mean anything over around $50), people are more likely to spend more time doing their research which includes reading descriptions.
So, make sure that you fill this to not only provide a detailed description of your product but to also emotionally draw your customers – share why they should buy from YOU, why YOUR product is the best among the others, and really try to showcase that this is the best deal they can get on the internet, if you can! Saying things like “You don’t want to miss out on this amazing deal!”, “Just In! These watches were sold out in just 2 months – grab them while they last!” – adding text as such will help you persuade your potential customer by causing urgency and excitement.
Remember, emotions are key! Also, try to talk to your customers directly if you can – use words like “You will love the feeling of the soft cashmere on your body!” This way you are telling them directly by using the word “You” and also generating the emotion / feeling that they will feel after they purchase and have the product in their hands.
5) Images
The MOST important part is getting images right! I see a lot of people selling on eBay just copying each other images (which is going to happen) but you get used to it. But, there are also a lot of sellers who don’t spend much time looking at their images. If your image is blurry – that’s a huge no no! If you only have 1 image – another huge no no! If your image is not showing the product in detail – you will not get a sale, or not enough anyway!
Two sellers selling a screen protector – same screen protector I should say – but if one has better images that are clear, crisp, showing every detail of the protector along with everything else we discussed above in their listing, they will almost always get the sale over someone who has a crappy image even if their screen protector might be $1 cheaper.
Also, use eBay’s recommendation of pixels size and if eBay marks the picture as “low quality” – change it! For each variation that you have, add a picture so the buyer is not confused when purchasing. Sometimes we have too many variations, in which case you can add an image with each variation’s name or number on it and point it to the variation image. This helps avoid confusion for the customer as sometimes if a customer is not sure which variation to pick or what the product offers based off of the images, they will probably just leave instead of reaching out to you.
6) Sell With An Offer Or Incentive!
Try to introduce offers wherever you can! When you add offers to your listings, eBay does favor it, at least initially, so keep adding offers once in a while. Sometimes as sellers are able to discount shipping if they combine two products together, so they offer BOGO 20% OFF and then adjust the shipping cost into the offer. I’d only suggest this if you have very low profit margins.
Otherwise, you can really offer two products at a good discounted price and more people are willing to purchase seeing a good deal especially if the deals are time-limited.
7) Email Marketing
eBay actually offers you an option to send newsletters to your customers if you have the Store subscription. This is another great way to market to the customers who have already purchased from you before. If they liked your products, purchased from you, liked your service – then they’re more likely to come back and purchase from you again, whether they buy from themselves or as a gift for someone else.
You can also include a barcode or a sign up link for customers in with their packages, that they can go to in order to sign up for your emails. You can use websites such as GetResponse or Aweber that let you start free email lists and automate a lot of marketing for you. This way you can keep in touch with your customers constantly and email about your new products, discounts and any special offers that you may have going on.
If you are thinking how do I create a QR code for customers to scan, then you can simply go to this website to create it for free and just print it on your marketing material and send it with each order. Don’t worry about spending extra $ on marketing materials, you can simply print this QR code on same paper as your packing slip or regular piece of paper but make it emotional and attractive! Perhaps offer another discount for those who sign up?
8) Free Shipping
Offering free shipping has a psychological benefit as customers like to see that they don’t have to pay anything extra – what they see, for how much they see it, is what they will get! This is why it’s important, especially if you sell high ticket price products, to offer free shipping wherever you can. If you can, offer this for all the listings that you have.
9) Pinterest
Pinterest is another great way to get more traffic to your store and the best part is that the effort is very minimal. All you have to do is copy your eBay URL and paste it into Pinterest to “pin” your item. However, this only gets you so far – Pinterest doesn’t like same images and links posted all the time. They like ‘new’ or ‘fresh’ images so if you do find that you may be able to get a lot of traffic from Pinterest (especially if your customer / target market is mainly women), then you can hire someone on Fiverr to do some Pinterest marketing for you. When I did this for my jewelry shop, I gained 30 new customers in just 1 month from Pinterest! It is extremely beneficial as over 70% of Pinterest audience is women.
10) Instagram and Facebook, maybe TikTok?
Lastly, some more social media! To gain more exposure, you can market your products by creating a business page for your shop on social media. First of all, it’s FREE to use so all you have to do is be consistent in posting about your products. This will not only help you grow your customer base but also help you connect with your customers on a constant basis. They will not only get to know updates about your business but also about you – which helps build connection.
*Disclosure: I only recommend products I would use myself and all opinions expressed here are my own. This post may contain affiliate links that I may earn a small commission from, at no additional cost to you.
