Sunday, June 2, 2013

Increase eBay Sales - Optimize Listings for Mobile Phones



You've been there, done that, right? The new great American Past Time - doing stuff on a mobile phone and ignoring the people in front of you. Let's face it, the world has about 6 billion cell phones (Huffington Post 10/2012). How many of those users are spending time on eBay Mobile? And how many of them are leaving your listings because the text is too small to read or they can't see the picture well enough? The good news is that you can optimize your eBay listings for mobile phones in just a few easy steps.


Listing types. Fixed price listings actually work better for mobile users because they don't have to go through as many screens to make a purchase. They can buy items in fewer steps. Now this isn't to say that you should nix auctions all together, because some buyers do prefer auctions. Just be aware that you may be missing mobile buyers who want a faster shopping experience. (Check out my podcast about listing types here - there are pros and cons to all listings types so you need a mix of different listing types to reach different types of buyers.)

Images. Eliminate empty space and make sure you have zoomed in tight on the product, edge to edge. If you are selling multiple items in a lot, use one good photo with one item in the lot as your gallery photo. Potential buyers might not want to even look at a tiny little picture of 25 pieces of baby clothes. Get their attention with a nice shot of 1 or 2 pieces, then include more in your listings. Everybody gets 12 free pictures now, so take the extra time to take more than just one photo of a huge lot of something.

Descriptions. Keep them short, sweet, and to the point. Succinct and concise. Include important information but don't clog up the screen with too much text and a zillion of your personal policies. Avoid using more than one color font. Some eBay experts even say to forgo the fancy backgrounds and templates because the extra graphics cause the listing to load more slowly (buyers might click away) or clutter up the screen to much. For eBay Mobile, less is definitely more! And use 12 point font or larger. Lots of Baby Boomers (there are about 76 million of them out there) don't always wear their reading glasses and may not even try to read your listing if the font is too small.

Item specifics. You know, those little boxes you check with size, color, brand, style, etc. Make sure those are filled out. The mobile app displays them on a perfectly formatted screen and many buyers may not even look past that point. 

Think through these issues when you are creating your listings, and remember that everyone isn't sitting in front of a huge flat screen monitor when shopping on eBay. Sometimes, it is better to think small.

For more information on this topic, listen to my podcast here.


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