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Posts Tagged ‘eBay Edge’

How Well does eBay’s Best Match Feature Stack Up?

Thursday, May 29th, 2008

On March 3rd Ebay launched a few new features. One of these was Best Match. Has this addition helped or hurt their business? Let’s take a look and find out.

Now when you log onto eBay and search for an item, instead of getting several thousand items that only match the words you type in, you get millions of items that all have the keywords you typed in - some not having anything to do with the item you are searching for.

Best Match - Changes Made

Along with the best match feature, they also made changes to their feedback system. For the past ten years, you could be honest about your experience on eBay.

You could give a positive, neutral, or negative feedback to a person or business, depending on how well you felt you were treated after a purchase or sale. Now, you can only give positive feedback to anyone you make a purchase from.

That means even if you were to get ripped off, or never get your item, you still have to leave positive feedback.

Search Results Changes

eBay also changed the way search results are displayed. Now, the higher your feedback score, the higher your auction will be displayed when someone searches for products, instead of the way it used to be.

In the past, this feature would display search results from the auction ending the soonest to auctions with more time. Now, if you have a 99% feedback rating, your auctions will be listed higher than someone who has a 95% feedback score.

This has many of eBay’s top sellers thinking of finding a new place to sell their items. The longer a person or business has been a member on eBay the more they have dealt with people and developed a feedback score. Sometimes, no matter how much you try, you just cannot satisfy everyone - so the ones that are not satisfied may leave a negative feedback.

This can impact your score, and put your auctions at the end of the search results.

The Bottom Line - Better or Worse?

With your items at the bottom of the search list, you have to find ways of getting your auctions noticed. You can sell your products for a lower price, but you still have to make a profit.

You would have to get your merchandise way below wholesale to sell below wholesale and make a profit. Also, don’t forget that eBay will get 10-20% just for you selling on their site. Since the changes were made in early March, many eBay sellers have been losing more money than they are making.

With some of their top sellers looking for other places to sell their items, eBay has to be asking themselves if these changes were a wise move, or if they took something that was working well and made unnecessary changes that will cause them to lose business.

Tags: E-Commerce and E-Business, ebay, eBay Edge, ebay seller, Leeia Ladipoh
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SEO Tips and Tricks for eBay Listings

Friday, February 22nd, 2008

As an eBay retailer, getting traffic to your store and auctions is critical to your business’ success. The most successful eBay businesses use search engine optimization (SEO) tips and tricks to get their eBay store and auction listings to show up in the natural listings of search engines like Google and Yahoo. An increase in traffic to your store and listings gives more people the opportunity to purchase your items, thus increasing your sales and profits.

The best SEO tips and tricks for eBay sellers

Make a keyword-rich listing title - The title of your listing is the number-one way that people will find your auction listings. Your title should be descriptive and have at least two of the most important keywords or keyword phrases for the item(s) that you are selling.

Add keywords and content to the item description - Without overdoing it, use as many of the most relevant keywords and keyword phrases in each of your item descriptions. Search engines love new content, so instead of copying and pasting information from the manufacturer’s website, create your own. Strive to make each of your descriptions 250-500 words in length, and be as descriptive as possible, mentioning brand names, model numbers and variations in spellings (kidclips, kid clips, kid klips, etc.).

Create an eBay store - If you don’t already have an eBay store, create one and take advantage of many tools available:

* Use all your custom store pages - Be sure to use every one of your store’s pages, using lots of keyword-rich content for each.

* Update store keywords - To keep your keywords fresh for the search engines, it’s a good idea to reset your store’s keywords every few months. Just go into the “marketing tools and search engine keywords” page from your store’s management page and create a new list of keywords.

* Create an About Me page - This is one of the few places on eBay where you can add links in your content, so take advantage. Put links to your store, specific auction pages, and other promotional pages you may have set up. Remember, search engines love new content, so update your page frequently with new information about your store and your products.

When you take advantage of all the SEO tools that eBay has to offer, bringing traffic to your store is easier than ever! And, best of all, each of these tools is easy to use and no html or special coding is required; you can do each of them all on your own.

Tags: boosting traffic, Carrie Hinkel, E-Commerce and E-Business, ebay, eBay Edge, SEO tools
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