Do Excessive Looks Without Sales Impact eBay Best Match Results?
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John, the reader who sells vintage books, tells me that too many looks without corresponding sales has a negative impact on your best match rankings in eBay.
People don’t seem to realize that they will be penalized for too many looks …a number of click-throughs with out sales is okay, but fter a certain number one’s item is reduced in visibility. Best match deems a certain number of looks past a certain unidentified number of click-throughs as undesirable – that buyers don’t want the item. However this flies against marketing wisdom and even against ebay’s own advertisings and touting of “hot” items. Sellers want eyes on their merchandise – the more the better. Take for example – if I list a seldom seen , rare first edition – I will have a great many dealers – other sellers – clicking in my auction just to look – did I get all the points? Do I have the rare dust-jacket etc. None of these will be potential buyers yet their looks will, eventially count against our visibility. If an item is rare enough there will be any number of viewers who just wish to see the items, but will not buy. This will count against the item as well as “no sales history”.
Here’s a statement from eBay [customer service], “We are now looking at how many times someone views your items compared to how many times it sells. If an item is looked at, but not sold, it can drop in search.”
Often I get emails from eBay sellers interested in relating their Best Match experiences. Not to long ago I received this note from John who sells vintage books and publications on eBay. He’s pretty frustrated with Best Match because the system doesn’t reward listings with single items in the same manner it does for listings that can build a sales history.
He has some interesting observations about key words.
We are long-time ebay sellers of antiquarian and used books, paper, old journals, photos, and sometimmes historical items, as well as vintage LPs. There are specific things which concern me about best match, and most of it has to do with the inability of best match to deal with stand-alone items.
We used to do all auctions – had pretty good luck. Then ebay started changing things around and suggested to us that fixed price listings would be the way to go – the future of ebay. So we converted a lot of our listings to 30 day fixed price. Good up front listing fees. It is still cheaper than a bricks and mortar store (I had a used book shop for 20 years). We did pretty well with fixed price … books going out every day. – We sell older material – a lot of nineteenth century material and early twentieth century – don’t get much into modern stuff … too much of it out there and too much of a race to the bottom. I don’t like to undervalue my stock. So sales were percolating along nicely and then in March things hit the proverbial wall.
We have recently added auctions back into the mix – I understand best match treats auctions differently – but have not had a lot of success with auctions lately.
Ebay reps (we have access to a ‘special’ phone connection )- and so the reps tell us we are key-worded to the max – our customer service is tops … high dsrs (5) ebay tells us we are in the top 1% of sellers as goes DSRs and customer service. I am afraid best match cannot handle single items. In emails from ebay we are told the best match system will look at our item and judge its sales history. The problem is that it is just the single item – there is no sales history to judge.
Frequently we are listing items for which there are no other copies on ebay and little sales history on the web. Period. SO my fear is that best match, having been given an impossible task (analyze sales history of an item that has no sales history) will then either stall and ignore what does not fit into the pre-conceived program – or will make up false data.
I fear the system is either broke — or we are experiencing what are being termed rolling blackouts — lots being written on that lately. – or both. Terapeak reported that of over 500 listings we have on ebay, only 95 of them were visible for Terapeak to analyze! – This is the very service / tool touted by ebay. If Terapeak can’t see out items – how can customers? I do not think they can, but for very brief moments when we are given a window.
Traffic is at an all time low – low traffic — no queries – no best offer offers – few watchers – even for items that are maxed out with what I know are top key words. a solid ‘hot’ key word should at least generate traffic, but they are not.
Interesting about the weight – or lack of it- that best match devotes to words like ‘by’. It is like the programmers at ebay decided to take a giant step backwards. Searches have always ignored articles and connectives … and it only makes sense that they do. But if best match is analyzing articles and connectives I fear it will return only poor scrambled results.
Also I have noticed it analyzes each word on its own … it does not have the ability to recognize a book title as a title. SO book titles naturally having words like ‘of’ and ‘by’ and ‘the’, etc., it makes it tough on the poor book seller. We havetaken to not using titles in the ebay auction title — actually we have been doing that for some time. And we never use curesy stuff like look! etc. Useless waste of space.
I may have touched on this before, but I did the ebay analysis tool on a search “Leather bound Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens” (Yep I had by in there and did not get a red dot). But the system really liked “leather Dickens” (that was its suggestion, not a query I made) “leather Dickens” … it liked Twist but not Oliver, it seemed not to be able to put Oliver Twist together .. likewise amazingly enough it did not recognize “Charles Dickens”, but analyzed each part separately … it liked Dickens but did not like Charles. All this seems pretty droll to me.
We are just two people and my listings are lengthy with full write-ups and frequently lots of pictures. I keep the boiler plate to the bottom of the page. Customers can’t hold the book to examine it, so it behooves me to display it as best I can. It feels as if every time we adjust to some new hurdle that ebay puts in place we must re-adjust to another hurdle. It often feels as if ebay has taken a belligerent, contentious attitude toward its customers. In order to deal with a few bad apples they punish the entire selling community. We have been selling on ebay since 1999 and are ebay rooters, but sometimes it seems as if the very team we are rooting for is laughing at us.
To readdress your question, auctions seem moribund. But I do not think our auctions or our fixed price listings are being seen, no matter that our stuff is coming up on google and appearing high on the first page.
Anybody have any ideas for John?
eBay Tweaks Best Match Algorithm
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In July, eBay announced that they were adjusting the Best Match search and sort algorithm to decrease the weight auction-style listings have been getting lately in favor of fixed-price listings. Quoted in AuctionBytes, eBay CEO John Donohue said, “eBay will ‘gently’ increase exposure to higher-priced and fixed-price listings.”
Today’s announcement that fixed-priced listings will no longer receive an automatic allotment of high-visibility exposures under Best Match seems to provide some balance to this policy change. Currently, sellers listing an item under the fixed price format received a limited number of high ranking listings in the search results pages where the listings were provided the opportunity to garner enough sales to retain a prominent position or sink in the search result listings. This policy is scheduled to go in effect on the 26th of October 2010 on the U.S. site.
AuctionLink Goes International!
Filed Under Auction Tools, Best Match | 4 Comments
I’ve spent the past couple of weeks tweaking AuctionLink for use by international eBay sellers. Besides eBay.com, AuctionLink now works for people or businesses who sell on the Canadian, Australian, and UK eBay sites.
What is AuctionLink and Why Should I Care?
AuctionLink is shortened, easy-to-remember web address that returns your current eBay listings. It makes it easy to include a link to all of your current listings in your e-mail sig files and Twitter tweets.
Here’s an example of an AuctionLink:
Even more significant is AuctionLink’s potential to help your Listing Performance Score – a key factor in getting to the front page of the Best Match search results.
A Listing Performance Score is calculated by dividing the number of sales generated for a particular listing by the number of times that listing has appeared (impressions) in the eBay search results. Listings appearing on AuctionLink are not considered as generating an impression. So, the more sales you can generate while keeping your impressions to a minimum will help your rankings in the Best Match search and sort calculations.
Visit http://AuctionLink.to today to get your own AuctionLink right now.