1. Optimize your product titles with relevant keywords

The maximum character count for eBay titles is 80. Play it safe and integrate relevant search terms/keywords. Use specific words to describe your product, avoid words that offer room for speculation. Speculative words, such as house, garden, electronics may provide you more visitors, but they will quickly leave your product because it is not what they are looking for. “Leaving your products” will hurt your buyer engagement rate. Specific keywords means higher interaction rate between your products and potential buyers, and more people find your listings relevant to what they are looking for! Aron Hsiao, Terapeak Marketing Communications manager says: “ Before Cassini, sellers created titles that matched as many search terms as possible. Today, with Cassini , this strategy is the worst you can have. Cassini is also investigating the performance of the products, not just the keywords.” So, for the sellers who have many different listings for a product, individual product performances will be rated independently.

2. Use GTC ( Good Till Canceled) with a small adjustment

GTC saves the sales history of your articles. The more sales and watchers a listing has, the higher it will go up in the search! For you this means: your product has a lot of interaction with buyers, and Cassini thinks that’s great! But what happens to products that have not been sold in the last 30 days? End the listings, and re-list them. Why? Because it will re-index the listing and wipe the previous history of bad buyer engagement. Once relisted, your listing will show up as a “new listing” and be on top of search while Cassini gathers data on it. Cassini forgets the ‘popularity’ that you had so far with the buyers, and you can start again. Bottom line is, if the listing gets good buyer engagement, it will stay up at the top. If it gets bad buyer engagement, it will be pushed down. So, in conclusion make it a habit to always end and re-list items with no sales after 30 days.

3. Keep your ‘interactive’ products in the eBay rank even though they are out of stock.

eBay has introduced a new feature: Out of Stock Inventory Control.
This feature prevents your listings from ending, even though you don’t have them on stock. So if you have a sales history, for ex.100 items sold, and the items is out of stock, the new feature will automatically show “out of stock” and not end the listing, so your sales history will be preserved and safe. This feature is supported by many third – party listing tools. Scarcity is good ‘bait’ for buyers. This is a proven strategy that gets customers to buy your product. For the ‘scarcity trick’ you can use a listing tool to make your listings always display “Last one” and make customers think you have one in stock left, even if in reality you have 50.

Attention: You should use this trick if the customers want to order only 1 item!

4. Provide the most value for your listings to stay competitive

• Free shipping
• Offer additional shipping methods: express, local pick up and international shipping.
• 30 – days return policy can help you to earn buyer’s trust and to increase your conversion rate.
• Best Price: Buyers are always looking for the best deal. If your competitors have a better price than yours, you can lose sales.

Reconsider your pricing strategy to stay more competitive. You can use eSagu! to set up the best strategy to reprice your hundreds of products and beat your competition. It also enables you to reprice on Amazon!.

5. Create sales events (badge sale)

You can create sale on your whole eBay shop, on specific categories or per product level. Buyers love sales promotions and it will entice them to buy something if they see it’s on sale. This will also help increase buyer engagement.

Attention: You might need need a permission from eBay to turn on this marketing function!

6. Take care of your reputation as a seller!

Cassini rewards sellers with great detailed seller ratings (DSRs) and TOP rating as a seller. You need a TOP in both categories in order to be on top of search results. Respond to open cases ASAP and must close all of them to maintain your rankings in search.

7. Auctions

If you have some popular items and you are able to auction them off without loosing any money, feel free to do so to help increase the traffic to your eBay store. With auctions, you can cross – promote your other items for sale. If an item is popular and is getting good buyer engagement, the auction will get more love compared to items with the similar keywords in the category.

8. Drive customers from “outside”

To increase the interaction between product and buyers, use a strategy which involves social media platforms, as well as email campaigns to drive targeted traffic to your new listings. By doing so, you will get more listing’s views and hopefully more sales, and in the same time will push your listings up in search. You will want to do this on newly listed items only.

9. Update your RSS feed

Pick a day, open your marketing tool on eBay called “Manage my store settings” and turn off your RSS feeds for 10 hours. After that, turn on the function again and your first 100 listed products will be boosted in the search results (re – indexing of listings). If you have more than 100 listings, there is an app called bayfeeds.com that performs this procedure with all your articles.

10. Use the eBay catalog

When you are able, use the eBay catalog. If your item is a well known brand, probably already exists in eBay’s catalog. All you have to do is enter the EAN or UPC and the listing will automatically be filled with the product data.

11. Add your products in the correct category

Always pay attention to the category in which you add your products. Make sure they are relevant, because catalog stuffing will not help your listing, as it makes your listing less accurate to people that see it. Wrong categories does not impress Cassini! In fact, it will lower your chances of being shown in top results. Cassini scores higher for accuracy than vague and ambiguous placing, so choose wisely based on competition and buyer behavior.

12. Provide all of your listings with items specifics that are available to you

Item specifics help to increase visibility of the products. They also act as a filter when a buyer is shopping, so they can easily find the item that are looking for. Play it safe, since Cassini does not only look at the title and category to decide whether the item is relevant to the buyer or not. Make sure all item specifics are completed and add custom specifics if needed!

13. Answer your eBay messages within 24 hours

The sooner you respond to a your eBay customers, the more likely they will buy from you. In the same time it helps to generate product – customer interaction, and once the customer buys the product will give you a boost in search.

14. Start with lower prices when you list completely new products

If you are listing new products, offer them at lower prices. Sell the products, build a sales history. Then increase the prices as long as it’s within the market rate for your category.

15. Use a mobile responsive and branded listing template

Hire an expert to design your mobile responsive eBay template and product template. This will help to strengthen your brand. Good eBay templates will optimize your conversion rate. It will provide you with sustainable and long – term competitive advantage as well as the trust of your customers.

16. Use variation listings

When possible, list your products using variations. Variations combine the number of views, watchers, clicks and sales, and also allow different products to be purchased from one listing. Cassini loves it!

17. Create combo packages for your customers to increase search rank

The combo packages strategy creates additional listings for your eBay shop without violating the listing rules. Combining multiple products, and using different keywords in the titles (but still the same items specifics) will help to increase your visibility. For example: you are selling T- shirts and jeans. Create a combo package of T Shirt and jeans, and at the end you will have 3 listings: 1x T- shirt, 1x jeans and 1x combination package. Crate exciting packages for your customers - packages that make sense! Take your chances and offer combined shipping conditions or even better, an extra discount. Your customers will appreciate this, and again will increase the product buyer interaction. Including the combo packages in your marketing will increase your conversion rate, because everyone wants to save money, right?

18. Use high – resolution product photos

Use high – resolution product photos (minimum 1600 pixels). This creates a great zoom effect. Good photos help with increasing the conversion rate. In addition, you should upload as many photos as possible. eBay has a limit of 12 photos.

Conclusion:

Know your target audience, or get to know them well. Always have one eye on your reviews and detailed buyer ratings. Create listings that turn visitors into buyers. Become the top seller in your categories and you will soon belong to the circle of winners. And remember: Buyer’s behavior changes over time!