Why my products’ rankings are so low?

[silkroadia]

My first language is not English, forgive me if I have any grammatical error.

I am selling women’s genuine leather bags in eBay AU site, and I am a top-rated seller, provide “eBay Premium Service”, free shipping, 100% positive feedback, DSR are 4.9, 5.0, 4.8, 5.0. My bags are not too expensive, maybe 5-10% higher than the average price. And I put 10% ad rate for promoted listings, the average rate is 7-8%.

When I search for “genuine leather handbags”, with “buy it now”, “new with tag” options, AU site totally has 8 pages result (192 products per page).

However, the first one of my product exists in the search result is at the lower half of the 7th page, and almost the lower half of 7th page and topper half of the 8th are all my products.

The results before my products, most of them are not top-rated sellers, most of them have lower feedback ratings than me, and most of them have lower positive feedback percentage than me, and most of their product location are in China as well.

Can you believe that? Even “170mm Genuine Leather Wristlet Strap Replacement Strap for Clutch Handbag Purse” has better ranking than my bags. It is not a TRS, low DSR, 98.5% feedback, from China as well.

I started selling on AU site at November 2018, and I became TRS at September 2019, before that, the rankings of my products are not bad, usually first one was in at least top 50-100. The rankings drops since October 2019, which was right after I became TRS and got the “eBay Premium Service” badge. And after that, my rankings keep dropping, became lower and lower.

However, I am pretty sure after 1-2 months, it will not drop anymore, because I will reach the very bottom then...

So any one could tell me why my products rankings are so low? Thank you.

[chameleon54]

Ebay use a computer system called Cassini to rank listings. It is very complex and ebay do not publicly explain how it works. It is a " curated system " meaning different people will see different things when they search for items. What you see is not always the same as what some-one else see's when they use exactly the same search words.

As for rankings the following is only based on my observations. No-one really knows.

* The more you sell in general ( high sell through rate ) , the higher your listings appear in searches and the more you sell.

* The less you sell ( lower sell through rate ) the lower your listings rank in searches and the less you sell. This rewards popular sellers and keeps them using the site and discourages poorer performing sellers who cost ebay just as much to service, but deliver less sales.

* Popular items that have regular sales are given better rankings than single items that have been listed for awhile. This is the single biggest determinant to visibility

* If a seller sells an item, similar listings from the same seller get a boost in visibility for a short while. The result is you can often sell two or three similar, but different items in a day or two.

* Many people complain that Chinese sellers gain preferential visibility in searches. This may well be true.

* New or recently revised listings receive a boost in visibility for a short period. ( I,m sure of this one, ebay CS use this technique when there is a problem ) Some sellers revise listings, changing one or two small details such as changing the price by a few cents or do bulk phantom edits of their listings every few days in order to boost visibility. ( revise listings without actually changing anything using the bulk editing tool ) I suspect the Chinese sellers may use this technique regularly.

Remember that your listings may not be visible at all for a period of time after editing. The larger and more established a seller is, the quicker their listings return to visibility after a bulk edit.

* I suspect ebay give preference to listings with a very high promoted listing percentage, although I am less ertain of this vthan some of the other stuff mentioned above. Personally I usually add a small amount to my sales price and use this money to pay for promoted listings. ie my buyers are paying more for my items to cover my ebay promoted listings fees.

[kopenhagen5]

I mostly search cheapest first or ending soonest so what you are talking about is irrelevant in my case.

And many potential buyers do the same.

[sandypebbles]

I mostly search time ending soonest 

[11dustyattic]

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@kopenhagen5 wrote:

I mostly search cheapest first or ending soonest so what you are talking about is irrelevant in my case.

And many potential buyers do the same.

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I search any way I can to filter out Chinese sellers 😉 I never search cheapest first because you get all the Chinese bleep 

[11dustyattic]

I know the answer to this or pretty damn close, but you think I'm going to help a Chinese seller. Nope

[lyndal1838]

That is a bit racist.

The seller is registered in China,  the goods are in China and they ship from China.....nothing underhand that I can see.

[digital*ghost]

No one can really tell you why, but you'll more than likely find this all works on a cycle anyway. Personally I'd try playing around with your titles a bit more - you don't really need words like "for women" in titles for products like this; A) because it's in the name of the category the bags are listed in and that automatically makes it a searchable keyword for your listings, B) very few - if any - would actually type "for women" when searching for bags and purses (I mean, some might type "women's wallet" or "women's satchel" but gender-specific words are already hand in hand with most descriptive words like handbag that I doubt it would occur to most to type "women's handbag / purse", same as they wouldn't type "women's dress").

You are likely to get far better results by adjusting titles to the way buyers actually conduct keyword searches, and they type in a way that usually makes logical and grammatical sense - if I was looking for a bag (and I have in the past) I'd start with what the most important attributes to me are, then add more if I get too many results.

eg say I specifically want something made from leather, and I already know I want a black one, so I start with, :

black leather handbag

I notice there's lots of results for "PU leather" so I add "genuine" (genuine black leather handbag).  Too many styles, I have preference for cross-body bags, so I add "crossbody" (genuine black leather crossbody handbag). Still need to narrow it down, because I like a larger bag and there's thousands of small ones in the mix, so my search gets refined again (large genuine black leather crossbody handbag).

You can see the order of the words can still make sense if not all of them are used, with the exception of genuine. "Large handbag". "Large black handbag", "black crossbody". And so on. 

This may not be how your competors got their advantage, but that doesn't mean you won't get one by having more relevant titles (cassini does take this into account - listings can appear high in searches that match the buyer's keywords, and sometimes ebay won't even show listings with keywords in a different order than the buyer's search terms. As a simplified example, if your title is "Black leather genuine handbag large" and I search for "large handbag" ebay might not even show me your listing at all).