Free postage and search results

[mykoda910]

When ebay decided to start charging fees on postage they claimed that items that didn't have free postage would be ranked lower in search results.

Being a good little seller I dutifully started making all my new listings free postage - only to see them ranking below other similar items with a separate postage charge!

On one of the searches I did today the top 2 items are from the same seller and charge a separate postage charge. The third item had free postage and was from another seller with a premium members badge on it. Both sellers offer 30 day returns, the top 2 each have a couple of sales and a few watchers and the third one has over 35 sales and more than 50 watchers!

The first seller has 1300 fb with 98.5% positive and the second one has 2500 fb with 100% positive.

To add insult to injury both of the first 2 items have text in the image (this seller has text and/or a border on many of her listings) which is supposedly against ebay's rules.

The only "plus" I could see to the seller of the first 2 items was that she's a "longtime member". I looked it up and she joined in February 2011 as opposed to the other seller who joined in May 2012. Also her 2 items were cheaper, but this was a 'best match' search.

I cannot for the life of me see how the seller of the first 2 items could possibly rank above the other seller.

Is there some kind of "ebay pet seller" list that you have to get on to rank higher in search results?

This isn't a one-off situation either, this seller consistently ranks higher in search results than other sellers, including myself. If a premium member with 100% fb and many sales doesn't rank higher then what hope do I have (not a premium member and not 100% fb).

Does anyone have any idea how the search engine works? I'm seriously considering ditching the whole free postage thing (I don't like it anyway as I can't offer postage discounts on multiple items). Or how do I become one of ebay's pet sellers so I can rank in the search results?

I'm just so fed up with ebay right now, what's the point in following their rules if they don't enforce them.

[clarry100]

Yeah we have two basic stores and like you we changed all our listings over to "FREE" postage about 18-months ago.

Also all the other little things that got us the badge you speak of on each listing.

It all made no observable difference to our search rankings or sales volume.

So its all a big load of hogwash what they tell you and what they actually do.

As far as we can see your item search ranking is mostly dependent on sales volume of a particular item.

For us as an item sells more (becomes more popular) it climbs higher up the list and vice-versa.

Once an item hits rock bottom and nobody ever finds it or buys it then its likely to linger there for a long time.

What we sometimes try is to cancel a low ranked listing and then relist it in the hope that someone filters on new listings and then sees it. That has worked on occsaion too.

When they hand out free auction insertion fees this tends to boost our BIN item sales as we only list auctions in this case (the $1.50 is too high for us to pay normally given the high failure rate).

As auction listings get closer to the end time they climb higher up the result list.

Some buyers will jump into the store from the links on the auction listing.

These are just a couple of the observations we have made that seem to work occasionally.

But how the actual search engine works underneath is really anybody's guess. Even theirs I suspect!

Good luck!

[dylan11235813]

There is some info at the following link. Not sure if it is at all accurate but it does give some pointers on increasing ranking.

http://www.ecommercebytes.com/cab/abu/y214/m01/abu0350/s02