eBay Sellers of the Bay Area – February Meetup

Optimizing Your Listings for Best Match

Presenter:

Julie Netzloff, Senior Product Manager on eBay’s Buyer Experience team

Transcript as exact as possible:

What is Best Match?

It’s the default sort on the eBay site. (Also thought of as a ranking algorithm.) A lot of people confuse search, what items actually come back when you type in a keyword, with Best Match. They’re actually two different things. Best Match sorts or ranks (same thing) the items and puts them in an order. It’s been the default search on eBay since March 2008. It was designed to solve a specific problem, which was relevance.

Now the example everyone uses is people would come to eBay looking for an iPod. And on the first page of the results they’d see chargers and cases and skins and screens. They wouldn’t see the actual iPod itself so they’d leave saying “eBay doesn’t actually sell iPods”. Best Match was introduced to try and introduce the concept of relevance to sort. To try and get items buyers were actually looking for onto the page.

A related reason was, we introduced the fixed price format of listings. They could be 30 days, 60 days, and 90 days. And when you have fixed price listings that can be live on the site for 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, “time ending soonest” which was a sort on eBay, no longer made sense for those types of listings. You have a 30-day listing that might only come up to the top of the results 30 days after it was listed. So we had this problem, lots of fixed price inventory, 30 days and 60 days.

So we launched that in March 2008. It was pretty simple. Time Ending Soonest was a primary relevance factor. We’ve made a lot of advances since then. One of the things we first realized was that auctions are different than fixed price. So we wanted to actually treat them differently when we sort them.

For auctions, the ending time of the auction is really important. It matters a lot to buyers. For fixed price listings, the ending time of the fixed price listing really doesn’t matter. So we sort auctions differently than fixed price. And for auctions, time still remains a very important factor. The nearer to an auction’s end, it will move up in ranking. For fixed price we use other relevance factors to determine which ranking to use.

There are 3 main problems that we’re trying to solve. 1) Trust – we want items from sellers that have a good track record. 2) Value – we want buyers to think they can come to eBay and get a great deal. 3) Selection – we want buyers to come to eBay and find what they want and have a great selection of that item. Those are really the three principles of what we’re trying to do. The first page of results, 50 items, we want 50 items that buyers want and will buy. We consider that our storefront.

We sort auctions and fixed price by different factors. Auctions – ending time of the auction makes a lot of sense and is important to buyers. We also use relevance there. So if someone’s searching for an iPod, we want the iPods at the top instead of the iPod cases.

We have two types of factors you can think about for Fixed Price. We look at how popular items are with buyers if they’re multi-quantity items. So we look at the number of times an item has been seen on the site vs. the number of times it sold. We use the number of sales vs. the number of impressions for a Fixed Price multi-quantity item. It’s compared to the competition. So everything on the search results page, we compare you to everything else that came up in that search. We’re looking for things with sales over impressions that are more efficient than others, more popular with buyers. Basically buyers are voting with their purchases to say, “this is really relevant, it’s well priced, and we like it.” We’re not privileging any individual person selling; we’re privileging what people are buying. We’re trying to help the buyers find what they’re looking for as fast as they can. So for example, you see two of the same item. One is $50, viewed 100 times and sells 50 items. The other is $100, viewed 100 times and sells 1 item. We’re going to put the one that sold 50 items at the top. It’s what buyers want.

There are functions that make sure that even if you only have one fixed price item you’ll still show up.

Q – If I have a lot of the same item is it better to list with multi-quantity vs. listing all items separately?

A – Yes, it is much better to list as multi-quantity. If you have 50 of the same item, it’s better to have one listing with 50 quantity and then you let your sales over impressions build up and it helps the ranking of your item. It helps us rank your item more appropriately.

Now we do have mechanisms for single-quantity fixed price because we know there’s a lot of value in that. But we can’t use the same type of runtime factors – sales over impressions – because obviously if it’s a single quantity, once it’s sold it’s gone. We have a lot of other data about the listing. We know about the seller, is it from a Top Rated seller? We know how it compares against other similar items. Is it using all the attributes? Item condition. How the price compares to other listings. Our goal is to get the best of the single quantity and the best of the multi-quantity.

As far as optimizing for Best Match, it’s actually very hard. There’s no one thing you can do to affect Best Match and get to the top. Because all of the things that make a listing successful are what we’re looking for, optimizing your business is really optimizing Best Match. Optimizing your listings for sales is also optimizing them for Best Match.

For example, if you have an auction listing and you’re not sure what category to list it in, you can look on the site and find similar items that have sold. See what successful sellers are doing and try to emulate that. It goes back to best practices. Write a great title. Don’t try and optimize your title for Best Match. Optimize your title to sell your item. You want clear titles, readable by your buyers. Item specifics. Have your terms stated clearly. All of these are best practices that are laid out in the eBay help pages. If you sell clothing, you need a good return policy because people tend to return clothing.

There’s a tool we have called the Listing Analytics tool. Free. Subscribe to it in My eBay. Shows your sales and impressions over the last 30 days. You can compare how efficient your listings are compared to the top 5 of search. There are common sense things you can do to optimize from there. We show you impressions vs. sales – we call that the listing funnel. We call it a funnel – first you have to be seen and that’s impressions. A buyer has to actually see your listings. Then you have to get that buyer interested enough to actually click on it. So the funnel is narrowing down. You have the impression, you have the click, and then it’s the listing itself that has to close the sale. So that’s the narrowest part of the funnel.

So what we advise, if you’re not getting any impressions, you need to go back to basics. Are you listing in the right category? How does your title look? Does it compare well to other sellers? Do you have the right words in your title to even come up?

Once you get the impressions, if you see you’re getting impressions but you’re not getting clicks on your listing, then basically the information on the search results page is not enticing buyers to click on your listing. So look at your photo. Is it really good? Does it really show what you’re selling? How does it compare to the other photos from other same items being sold? Is it professional? Is your title clear? Does it attract a buyer? Enticing? Look at your price. If you’re charging more than others selling the same item or charging more than you can go buy it from at Target that could be a problem. Look at your price, look at your shipping, anything that somebody sees on the search results page. The search results page is how you draw people in to look at your item.

If you’re getting impressions and you’re getting clicks but you’re not closing the sale, then you need to look at your listing itself. Look at the competition, see how it compares. I always tell people the most important thing you can do is see what your competition is doing. If they’re doing something better than you are, do something to copy it. Think about how you buy too. Sometimes you click on a listing and you have this quick negative feeling. That’s the paragraph that says, “If you buy from me and you give me negative feedback I’m going to get you back…” Think about your own listings. Do you want to do the same thing? Other buyers are very similar to you. Layout your terms of sale very clearly. Do you accept returns? Do you have combined shipping? What are your policies? Make them clear and professional so people can really see them and understand them. Scary terms can turn away a buyer. Does your description look professional? Do you even have a description? I sometimes look at items I’m really interested in and see people who haven’t even bothered to put in a description. I think – no – I’m not going to buy that. Have you put in the item condition? Those are really what close your sale.

If you’re selling a fixed price particularly, use the Listing Analytics tool. It’s a tool that we’re really going to invest in over the coming months and years. We see it as a tool that can help sellers optimize their business.

There’s no one trick to get to the top of Best Match. We ask you to follow our listing best practices, make an attractive listing that attracts buyers.

Q. What about the impact of relisting an unsold item vs. sell similar?

A. If you relist, we keep your sales over impressions for that listing. The question is if your listing hasn’t done well, do you want to keep those sales over impressions numbers? In general, we recommend that you relist and keep your sales over impressions numbers. There’s not any advantage to sell similar because of the way we rank unless you make a significant change to your listing like lower the price, or change the title, it’s not going to be very successful. If you are making a significant change to your listing, you can consider selling similar.

The nice thing about sales over impressions is that it’s dynamic. So if you suddenly sell an item, it can move you up quickly. We used to rank just on total sales. That was a lot harder for folks to compete with. If your competition has 20,000 sales it’s going to take you a long time to get that same total number of sales. Sales over impressions is a much fairer way of doing it. If you have a small number of impressions, a sale could have a big impact and you could move up a lot.

Q. What percentage of buyers sort by Best Match vs. price?

A. Don’t have specific numbers but most use Best Match. Also depends on the category of the product. Buyers can customize their search and a lot of our biggest buyers do that.

Q. What about having two listings of the same item – one at fixed price and one at auction? How will those be affected? Which will come higher?

A. It’s a hard question to answer. They’ll be ranked differently. As the auction comes closer to ending it will be ranked higher when it’s relevant for buyer search results. The fixed price listing is going to be compared against everything else – price, shipping…what it looks like compared to the competition. And it’s going to be ranked compared to that. So I can’t really say. If you’ve got an awesome price, that fixed price listing might be ranked really high as soon as it’s listed where as your auction might take a little longer to move up. Auctions are more weighted by time ending soonest. It’s impossible for me to predict exactly what would happen though. But two completely different things would happen. Your auction item, if it’s 7 days out, may be on page 3 or page 4. But your fixed price item, because of all the other factors we’ve talked about before, might show up on page 1 right away.

Q. Can Terapeak give you some of that information?

A. Terapeak is a great tool to give you trends. It won’t necessarily give you any help with any of the details of Best Match. It’s more of an aggregate tool. When do I start selling for the holiday season?

Use Completed Items search on eBay. See items that have been sold like yours. Check out their start price, what they sold for, was it fixed price, multiple quantities? Mimic these sellers – follow what they’re doing. Look at what is selling and try to understand.

It’s also important to know how much competition there is. For example, if you’re selling a Nintendo Wii, there’s so much competition that it’s probably very difficult for you to get yours on page 1. But if you’re selling in a more specialized market, it’s a lot easier to compete. You have to be realistic. If you’re selling a Nintendo Wii, you have to have an awesome deal to get on page 1.

Q. When I search for an item, how many different points can I request? If I just put in “blouse” I’m going to get thousands.

A. You can search on a lot of different words. The average for buyers is searching on 3 or 4 words. What’s really good to do is use the left navigation. Use the Item Specific filter on the left side. So for example, I want a large blouse… Only 1% of buyers use Advanced Search, which opens up all of these new options. You can call a “blouse” a “shirt”, a “top” or something else. If you put those in square brackets separated by a comma then it will look for listings with any of those terms but it doesn’t have to have all of those terms. But if you just put all of those terms separately in your search then the listing has to have all of those terms. Your search might come back with zero results. So there are tricks to doing this but you want to look into Advanced Search. You can also use the minus sign. You can say you want to search for “jackets” but minus “velvet” – so with the minus sign it will remove all the velvet jackets from your search results.

Search for “men’s jackets” and it might say related searches “men’s coat”, “men’s blazer” and everything similar. It’s telling you other terms buyers are using to look for essentially the same item. So this is telling you buyer behavior. What words are buyers using? Maybe buyers aren’t spelling “blazer” correctly so you need to know that. Could be misspelling “Abercrombie”. That tells you the words to use in your title.

Q. Is there a way to get rid of Reserve Auctions when you’re searching?

A. I’m not aware of a way to do that. I don’t think there is.

Q. I’ve seen sellers use capitals in the title.

A. In general we recommend against capitals. But, see if your competitors are doing that, maybe it makes sense. If they are and they’re successful then maybe you should consider it. But it’s not a best practice. The answer really is try different things. Once your item shows up the goal is to get someone to click on it.

Q. If you have an item where your competition sells repeatedly the same thing but you’re a one-time seller of that item, you’re never going to be at the top of the results?

A. It’s possible your single item will be at the top. You have to be well priced. How does your price and shipping compare to that multi-quantity listing? It’s not impossible to get above that item. But single quantity items really have to be of high quality. You have to meet one of the other factors. Let’s say I have one iPhone I’m selling. I go against others with lots of inventory of iPhones who got it at a lower price. The reality is that’s what buyers are looking for. If a seller has iPhones for $500 in multi-quantity and I’m trying to sell mine for $600, I shouldn’t show up. That’s not what buyers want.

Q. (follow up) What are the factors that will let my single listing compete against the multi-quantity listings?

A.

Pricing

Listing Quality

Shipping Price

You as a seller – if you’re not a Top Rated Seller you may not get as high on the list.

The related question is do you have to list that in fixed price? Auctions have the ending time component that helps it get a little bit of a boost as it’s ending. So that’s another thing to consider. If you have one item in a very competitive category, maybe you should be listing it as an auction instead of a fixed price. That almost guarantees you that at some point in that last day, you’re going to be on the first page of the results.