Your business needs new customers. Where do you find them? You may want to try using eBay to find new customers who are looking for your products. Selling products on eBay gives you the chance to sell excess inventory as well as the chance to extend your outreach so you can sell your products to as many potential customers as possible.
Once you’ve decided to sell your products on eBay, you’ll need to make sure your business is as visible as possible. Right now, there are an estimated 25 million sellers on eBay, which is a huge amount of competition. Yet, this doesn’t mean you can’t sell products on eBay. You just need to make sure you use the right techniques to boost your visibility so more potential customers will see your business and make a purchase.
Posting items on eBay is relatively simple, but you won’t want to stop there. You’ll want to read through the list below to learn more about what you should watch out for when you’re placing products on eBay to sell and what you should do to improve the ranking of your products.
Watch Out for Formatting Errors or Store that Isn’t Unique
Poor formatting can lead to customers backing out of your eBay store page and looking elsewhere for what they want. A store that’s not unique is not going to stand out very well and many customers might not notice it at all.
Your eBay store is a representation of your business. You need it to stand out, but you do need to make sure everything is formatted properly. Test the appearance of your store on multiple devices to get an idea of how it looks and make sure nothing looks “funny” or out of place.
Watch Out for Poor Listings
Titles and subtitles that have symbols or weird spellings, or that simply say “Look!” are not attractive to potential buyers. In fact, most buyers will skip over these listings because they don’t tell the buyer what the listing is actually for or they’re too difficult to read.
Instead, carefully construct titles, subtitles, and descriptions for every listing. Using SEO techniques in each of these fields can be beneficial, but you will still want to make sure they’re attractive to the buyer. They shouldn’t notice keyword stuffing throughout the description or have to wonder what exactly the product is because there’s just a list of generic keywords in the title.
Watch Out for Spelling Mistakes and Other Errors
Spelling mistakes can drive customers away and can lower the visibility of your eBay store simply because you don’t have any customers. Many customers won’t want to purchase anything from a shop that has multiple spelling or grammar errors in their descriptions.
Run every title, subtitle, and description through a grammar checking app or program before publishing it in the listing. Even if you don’t catch every single thing, minimizing spelling and grammar mistakes can help boost your chance of a customer purchasing your product.
Watch Out for Multiple Item Listings
Multiple item listings look like a great idea. You get to create one listing and have multiple products for sale in it. However, this isn’t as good of an idea as you might think. In fact, it could lower the visibility of your listings on eBay.
Each listing has a spot in the search results. When you combine listings into a multiple-item listing, you have one listing show up in the search results. If you’re selling 20 of the same item, you want it to show up 20 times, not once. Have each product listed separately so they’ll show up separately in the search results. The more it shows up in the search results, the more likely it is customers will see your items, not your competitor’s.
Watch Out for High Shipping Prices
It’s easy to pass the shipping price onto the customer when you sell items on eBay. You can price your products much lower this way, so it might seem like this would be a good idea.
Customers love to save money and get something for free.
Unfortunately, when you pass the shipping price onto the customer, it can lead to your listings being ranked lower.
Listings that include free shipping, even though the item price may be a little higher, can boost the ranking for your listings. Plus, customers love to get things for free. Even though they may pay a little bit more for the product, the free shipping can make your listing more attractive. The more attractive it is, the higher it’s going to rank and the more likely it is the product will sell.
Do Use Keywords Throughout Store and Listings
Although you should be careful to avoid keyword stuffing, you will want to use keywords throughout your store and your listings. This is the main component of search engine optimization and one you’ll want to use correctly. All parts of your store, such as the seller bio, should be filled out with carefully-chosen keywords to help optimize your eBay store for the searches.
Make sure you use short and long-tail keywords, and make sure you choose keywords that customers are using to find products like the ones you sell. All keywords should be relevant and placed in the content naturally.
Do Use Photos in Listings
Photos do more than just show buyers what your product looks like. You can also use alt tags with keywords for each photo you upload for your product. The alt tags allow the search engine to “read” the photos and know what they’re about. This is another way to use keywords in your store and help boost the store’s visibility in search results.
Do Use Adaptive Formatting for Your Listings
While you will want to make sure your store stands out, you’ll also want to make sure the formatting is adaptive. A recent study showed that mobile use was involved in more than 60% of eBay transactions.
Optimize your listings for mobile devices.
Whether it’s to view the listing initially, to make the purchase, or to check the listing, the buyer was on mobile at least once.
When you carefully format your listings so they can be viewed on mobile devices, you’re making it easier for buyers to see what your product offers and why they will want it. You’re also making it easier for them to make a quick decision to purchase the products and, the more sales you have, the higher your ranking will be.
Do Provide as Much Information as Possible About Your Products
You’re trying to sell your products, so you need to tell customers why they need these products. You want them to be excited about purchasing it so they don’t hesitate and end up choosing something else. Putting as much information as possible in the description gives you the chance to get customers excited about purchasing the product and shows them why they need to purchase it.
Choosing the words for the description carefully is vital. You’ll want to insert keywords, but make sure you’re not using too many. You’ll also want to make the description as educational as possible as this can help boost your ranking as much as the keywords will. The better your description, the more likely it is the viewer will purchase the product.
Do Respond to Customers Quickly
How customers view your business is crucial. If your customers aren’t happy, your rankings will drop. A large part of optimizing your eBay store is making sure your customers are happy so you’ll have a higher seller rating. One of the parts of the seller rating you can directly impact is how fast you respond to your customers.
Have a way to check your eBay messages often so you can respond to any questions or comments as quickly as possible. Customers expect a fast response nowadays. The faster you can respond, the happier they’ll be with their interaction with you and the higher your seller rating will be.
Do Provide Tracking Information for Your Products
Products being delivered late can negatively impact your seller rating quickly and drastically. You can add tracking information when you ship your products to help avoid this and make sure you don’t suffer because of the delivery times.
If you do not provide a tracking number and the item does not arrive by the time you stated, the customer can complain about the late delivery and your seller rating will decrease. However, if you do provide eBay with a tracking number, it will show your product was shipped on time. This shows you did everything possible to get the product to the customer, so if it is delivered late because of the shipping company, it will not negatively impact your business.
Selling items on eBay, just like amazon, gives your business the chance to branch out and reach more customers. However, you will want to be careful to make sure your listings are attractive to potential buyers and properly optimized so your eBay store will stand out amongst the competition. Start working on this today to get the chance to reach more customers tomorrow.
