eBay Consumer Demographics
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This post summarizes a published academic paper that contrasts the demographics of people who buy on eBay and those that don’t. The study finds that family size, consumption motivation, and perceived economic threat are key characteristics that impact participation as a bidder on eBay.
Identifying characteristics of your customers or audience is a fundamental marketing principle. If you are selling on eBay, what research have you done into the demographics of your customers?
Although different niches within eBay are going to have different demographics — the football jersey collectors are likely to be a different lot than the people who bid on knitting supplies — there are some general characteristics that apply to the eBay customer base as a whole. Some of these are identified in a paper titled “A Comparison of the Characteristics of eBay Consumers and eBay Nonconsumers” written by Professor Gregory S. Black and published in the Sept ‘07 issue of Journal of Direct, Data and Digital Marketing Practice.
Here are some highlights:
The research found that eBay consumers have larger families than do nonconsumers.
Several possible reasons may contribute to this finding. Consumers from larger families have more household expenses and must expend more resources to provide clothing, etc, for their families. eBay is a known source of ‘good deals’, and the motivation to be more fiscally frugal for these larger families may lead them to make eBay purchases. …eBay might also be a time-saving resource to consumers from larger families.
It also noted that eBay consumers have a higher consumption motivation than nonconsumers.
Consumption motivation is a concept describing a consumer’s desire to have an objectively satisfying buying experience. …One can easily compare prices, sellers (by looking at feedback ratings) and products on eBay and then determine how much one is willing to pay for that item. If the selling prices actually exceeds the price the consumer is willing to pay, the consumer will not have to purchase that particular item and will face no discomfort in having to tell a sales person ‘no’. The consumer can then find another similar item and bid on it. This consumption motivation may be more difficult to experience in a brick-and-mortar shopping experience because of the extra time and other resource requirements.
Finally, eBay consumers perceive a higher economic threat than nonconsumers.
Economic threat can be defined as the degree to which a person believes that the security of the domestic economy is threatened by foreign competition.
When’s the last time you thought about who your eBay customers are?
Even though you maintain a 4.8 or better average DSR rating, Best Match will disadvantage your listings in the search results if you have too many individual DSR ratings of 1 or 2 in the past 30 days.
Randy Smythe blogged about the experience one of his readers had recently with eBay’s Best Match. This power seller maintains a 98% positive feedback rating and has a 4.8’s or higher in all of the average Detailed Seller Ratings (DSR’s). Therefore, according to the published information on Best Match, the seller qualifies for higher rankings in the eBay search results under the Best Match algorithm.
However, the seller noticed a 30% decrease in sales an contacted their TSAM (Top Seller Account Management team). This is what was related to the seller:
They called their TSAM and were told that they had a few buyers give them 1 or 2s on their DSRs so eBay lowered their items in the search. She said there were 14 ratings showing 1s or 2s for the past 30 days. Well, as you can imagine, the seller was a little miffed since their DSRs were at the required level for search advantage.
Here’s what we can conclude from this:
- Listings will be disadvantaged in eBay’s search results under the Best Match if the seller has received a certain number (or percentage) of low scoring DSRs (1’s or 2’s) in the past 30 days.
- This factor is weighted higher than the positive effects of maintaining a high average DSR score (4.8) in the algorithm.
This new insight will be included in the next version of my free download Best Match Made Simple.
Never Use Negative Best Match Keywords
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Right now on eBay there are 4,707 auctions with the term “never used” in their listing title. There are 1,603 listings with the term “never opened.” There are 2,276 auctions with “never worn” in the title.
This is bad news for the seller who wants to rank high in the Best Match search results for items that are new. Why? Because as I explain in my free eBook Best Match Made Simple keywords you include in the listing title can have a positive or negative impact on your auction’s rankings in the search results. This determination is based on bidders’ past history for listings with those words for a particular search query.
If listings with words in the title like mint or New in Box (NIB) tend to get clicked on, added to watch lists, bid upon, or purchased for a particular search query, they will help auctions that include those words rank higher in the Best Match search results.
Conversely, if keywords like used, opened or worn tend to be avoided by bidders who are searching for new items, these words will have a negative impact on auction listings that include them – regardless if they are preceeded by the word never.
Here’s an extreme example. Use the BayEstimator to analyse the effects of the listing title underwear never worn against the search query underwear. Now use it with the title new underwear. That’s a 20% increase in my auction title’s Best Match relevance score. I also have 7 more characters in the title when I use the word new vice never used which affords me more room to include other valuable keywords such as mens, sexy, briefs, or boxer.
The moral of this story – never say never!
Top 10 eBay Photo Mistakes to Avoid
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Here’s a list of the top ten mistakes to avoid when prepping images for your eBay auctions.
We’ve all seen them. On many occasions, they made us hit the back-button as quickly as we came. I’m talking about lousy pictures on eBay listings. At best, they are embarrassing. At worst, they are misleading and borderline fradulent because they misrepresent the item being sold. Usually, they just give potential bidders a bad impression of the seller’s dedication to quality which is not the image they should be trying to convey.
Photo mistakes are seemingly epidemic on eBay. To give you an idea of how common the problem is, it took me less than an hour of poking around the action site to find the examples below.
- Out of Focus If the auction photo is out of focus, how is the buyer to confirm the item’s condition? To help with focus, use a tripod or other solid surface to help you keep the camera steady. Overall, an out of focus image makes me question the quality of the seller. Are they deliberately trying to mislead me? If they can’t manage to focus the camera, can they manage to pack the item for shipping?
(Remember, these are real auction photos – I can’t make this stuff up!) - Distracting Backgrounds A good eBay photo keeps the prospective buyer focused on the item being sold. It should be free of distractions in the background. While a couch is not a horrible background for your eBay image, I might be subconciously judging you as a seller by your taste in furniture relative to my own. Tossing a plain, clean, light colored blanket over the furniture in the background would keep me focused on your item.
How’s this for a distraction? This pictures beow are from an auction for a car trunk part. Note the seller’s tongue and face peeping through the hole. Creepy!
- Glare Glare is usually caused by a reflection of the camera’s flash on a shiny surface. To prevent glare, try taking the picture with an indirect light source such as next to a window on a sunny day, outside on a cloudy day, or with some lamps providing light from the side or an angle. If you choose to take the picture next to a sunny window, make sure that the window is on the side and not in the background – otherwise you will have a silhouette in front of an overexposed background.
- Stealing Other People’s Pictures If you pull it straight from their server, the other seller might swap the image file your “borrowing” with something like the one below. See how many bids that gets you…
- Clutter Again, you want potential bidders to focus on what you are selling. Remove or cover the background clutter whenever possible.
- File Size I’m not going to slow down my page loading time by including an example of a massive image file that is still too common on eBay. Suffice to say that they still aren’t hard to find. Huge image files make your auction take too long to load and cause potential bidders to scroll up & down, left and right to see the different parts of whatever widget you are selling. Both issues will cause the visitor to click on the back button long before they click on the bid button. Remember, just because you have broadband internet service doesn’t mean your bidders do. In fact, according to a GAO report, 21% of US households don’t even have access to cable or DSL. So think about that next time you upload a massive file. Set your camera to “image size: small” or resize the image in your photo editing software. If this confuses you, I suggest you stick with eBay’s image hosting service. They automatically resize any images you upload to no larger than 400 x 300 pixels.
- Cropping Sometimes all an auction picture needs is a quick crop to help the item being sold be the center of the potential bidder’s attention. Need some software to help you do this? Download Google’s Picasa for a free and easy to use image editing application. A crop would help the image below. At least the sink isn’t full of dirty dishes!
- Lack of Close Up Unless the auction is for the cardboard box background, I the picture below speaks for itself. Zoom-in, step closer, or crop the image so the item being sold fills most of the frame.
- Stock Photos Stock photos are fine if you are selling new items. However, when you are selling used items, a stock photo could mislead the consumer as to the condition of the product. Auctions involve a significant amount of trust on the bidders part. Pictures are one way of developing that trust. Providing accurate pictures helps the bidder determine if your definition of mint condition matches their definition.
- Poor Lighting If an image is too dark or too light, the buyer is going to have some difficulty making out the details of the photograph. Image editing software will be able to help with some exposure issues, but your best bet is to get the lighting correct when you take the picture.
So here’s the moral of this story, if you aren’t putting much effort into taking and posting good eBay pictures, bidders aren’t putting much effort into looking at them.