Monday, April 14, 2014

3 Tips for Increasing eBay Traffic and Sales


eBay sellers are becoming increasingly frustrated with lack of sales or slow sales since the change in the search engine algorithm last July. Many sellers are intimidated all the changes, and what we are supposed to be doing now to be successful. I see this frustration daily from sellers from all walks of life, all store levels, and using different business models. 

Usually on a daily basis, I receive emails or Facebook messages about these issues:

My sales suddenly dropped off. What am I doing wrong?

Traffic to my listings is way down. What happened?

My items aren't coming up in searches - why not?

How can I increase sales? My prices are already as low and I can go.

If you don't understand the Cassini search engine, and haven't educated yourself about how eBay rewards and punishes sellers for different actions, this is a huge part of the problem. The new search engine not only rewards sellers for doing certain things, but it actually punishes sellers for doing or not doing other things.  The punishment is being pushed to the bottom of the search - so far down that buyers don't see the listings.


3 things you can do immediately to improve traffic, and hopefully sales:

1. Make sure listings are optimized for mobile. eBay estimates 40% of sales are made on mobile devices. I see this error a lot, and if buyers can't read your listings on mobile, they won't buy from you. This isn't a Cassini issue, but is important to connecting with buyers.

2. Extend return policy to 30 days, whether you like it or not. Cassini rewards sellers for this and you will be placed higher in searches.

3. Remove any extraneous HTML code from your description area. Listing templates, banners, widgets, maps, and info copied from the internet that carries code with it can junk up this area, and Cassini can't read it. Listings with too much HTML are punished and pushed to the bottom.

Learn about more ways to improve sales on eBay here.


1 comment:

Unknown said...

Awesome article! Do you think doing 90 day return policies would help even more? On some items there's such a low return rate it wouldn't make a difference. What do you think?