One tip is to factor in free postage. That I believe gets you higher in searches.

In your listings, and in all other correspondance, teach people how to get rid of Best Match as the search default.

Everyone will thank you for it - Best match is hated by Buyers and Sellers alike.

the3coopers wrote:

In your listings, and in all other correspondance, teach people how to get rid of Best Match as the search default.

 

Everyone will thank you for it - Best match is hated by Buyers and Sellers alike.

Is there a way to stop it being the default search?

I usually manually change mine to *ending first*  but if best Match didnt come up at all, would be wonderful

The secret to humour is a sense of humour

nurse-gadgets wrote:

Thanks everyone for your replys, keep them comming.

I believe the 'best match' is a default set buy ebay.
It goes along the line of the gallery feature ($14.95) - who really will click a small button on the listings menu? ive never done it myself when searching for items.

It is really quite simple to set your search preferences...I have had mine set the same way since I first started using ebay 10 years ago...it takes a couple of minutes

http://pages.ebay.com.au/help/search/customize-results.html

btw...you would be surprised how many people DO click on a small button on a listing page...everyone I know who uses ebay hates the so called Best Match and has adjusted their settings accordingly.

As bear said, after a search, select customize view at the right top.

Select advanced options to the right, make you changes and apply.

Now you can have Ending soonest or Lowest price, without the default best match. You can always default back again.

Being a small seller can have advantages, too. Some of the more obvious ones are more personalised customer service, post-sale attention/care. If you try to mimic the large sellers, you could well be mistaken for one and in some ways mistake is very much the operative word. Use the differences between yourself and high-volume sellers as a selling point rather than a disadvantage.

Definitely agree with PJ though, if you want to increase your reach, one of the best things you can do is get some different products listed that can cross-promote one another.

I reject your reality and substitute my own. ~Adam Savage

Maybe list multiple items (I don't mean more than one of something perhaps a variety of items) and offer combined postage discounts. For what it's worth I avoid the sellers with the massive feedback ratings if possible (often no personal service or attention to detail). Also when I search for items on ebay I set the filters to list the best price for item and postage and start from there. I don't always buy the cheapest it can depend on sellers reputation (if the seller has a huge negative rating I wouldn't buy from them). Then I look at what other items the seller is selling that I might be interested in.

If I only had one item to sell I would take advantage of the 30 free listings a month and list them one at a time as auctions.

You will never make any money listing one item with a very low profit margin in store format, you would have to sell dozens just to cover all the fees.

Stores work best with a minimum of 50 different items, preferably 100 unless you are selling only a few very much higher priced items.

If you added feature plus at another 50 bucks per listing to your costs you would be in the doggie doo doo big time.

I don't think you worked out a business plan or a profit and loss projection before you opened your store, I would do so now.

My problem lies in reconciling my gross habits with my net income.

I'm fairly new to selling but I find that if an item is selling well then it gets ranked higher in 'best mach', even just a few sales will get a good ranking. Maybe sell to break even for a while and build up a few sales.

For some reason also, out of the blue, I will start getting orders for an item from say 5 different people that I haven't sold anything from for over a month, which seems odd.

It's the little things that count which most of the high volume low cost sellers have forgotten, repeat business is big business.

Cheers, Dil

dylan11235813 wrote:

I'm fairly new to selling but I find that if an item is selling well then it gets ranked higher in 'best mach', even just a few sales will get a good ranking. Maybe sell to break even for a while and build up a few sales. 

Ebay commonly states that "Sales to Impressions" is important in Best Match

That means (other things being equal) that if you have 2 sales on a listing and your opposition only has 1 sale, then yours will rank higher. This means you should be using Good Till Cancelled listings, so that you get multiple transactions on a single listing.

You can do this by selling at low cost for a while - done correctly you will get lots of Sales (orders) compared to the number of Impressions (each time your item appears in the Best Match search results). However, once you edge up the price then your Sales will drop... your items will be shown to lots of people, but not as many will buy if it's too dear... this causes your item to drop down again in teh Best Match rankings.

After a while (and overall) it sort-of stabilises, whith each listing falling into it's natural place in the overall scheme of things. But it's confusing to new sellers who cannot work out why their stuff isn't getting ranked.

---

An example of Sales To Impressions - say you use a really catchy title and have a low price. Your item appears in lots of buyer's Seach Results because of that. But in the listing you have some "catch" or something, so that a pretty low proprtion of people actually buy once they look at your listing description. In this example, your item will drop down the rankings due to the reduced Sales To Impressions ratio.

You might realise something - Best Match and Sales To Impressions actually penalises people who use Keyword Spamming. They get a lot of Impressions (because they are appearing in more search results than they should be) but the buyers don't buy stuff that is misadvertised. So they make less Sales proportional to the number of Impressions than honest sellers, and thus get ranked lower.

hamsy3 wrote:

All a load of gobble d gook if you ask me - This is supposed to be an easy to use, every person's Auction Site - If Ebay can't or won't make it simple & fair for everyone... i.e. rank according to time left, then what's the use????

Time left only works for Auctions, and the majority of listings on Ebay are not Auctions. In fact, many sellers now days run Good Till Cancelled listings, and they NEVER end... so they'd never get to the first page of the search results!

Things have changed, consumers aren't as interested in Auctions as they used to be - so eBay has had to change too.

I never look at mine either, pj.

I never do searches by 'best match' either. Price + postage - lowest first is my preferred modus operandi.

If you want ending soonest, hamsy, set your searches for that. It's only a couple of clicks.

If you're going my way, I'll go with you - Guess