In a pre-Thanksgiving blog post, Google announced updates to their mobile shopping experience.  

Recognizing that mobile shopping habits continue to evolve, Google's changes to the buyer experience to help buyers "...browse, research, compare, and...[buy]."

Specific enhancements include:

• Easier access to key product information via a “Quick View” button which exposes a larger image, the product description, product reviews and seller ratings.
• A new label alerting the buyer if there’s a “newer model available” (in the case you are browsing last year’s product).
• Navigation that enables buyers to easily find similar or related products
• Merchandising so buyers can discover more products from the same brands or retailers

Underlying all of these changes is rich, merchant-provided data -- data that we can help find, organize, and enrich prior to feeding to Google.

We take pride in enabling sellers to meet Google Shopping best practices and guidelines that help drive their sales.  If you are new to us, please contact us to learn more or schedule a demo!

eBay recently announced the details of their Fall 2016 Seller Update.  We will cover this update with a series of articles.  This article will focus on structured data -- a topic we've covered previously.    

With this release, eBay continues its march towards a more Amazon-like experience in terms of helping buyers more easily find and purchase products.  With structured data, eBay listings can be more easily indexed by search engines, including eBay's own search engine or external search engines such as Google.   And if products are easier to find, the sales will follow as well!

Prior to this current push, eBay's listings were hard for search engines to find.

The interesting change with this update is that eBay will now allow sellers to use other product identifiers, and specifically Amazon ASINs.  This new capability will be available in February, 2017.

And the even better news for CommerceESB users is that we continue to make it easy to include structured data as part of your eBay listings.  See our article on structured data best practices to review what should be done and how.  

At CommerceESB, we have a long track record of helping sellers create effective listings.  Please contact your account manager if you want some advice -- we are happy to help our customers continue growing their business!

On July 21, eBay released their 2nd quarter results -- and we finally have seen some good news ala growth:

• US GMV (i.e. total sales) grew by 5% vs. 3% in the previous quarter
• Sold items grew by 4% vs. 3% in the previous quarter
  
• $2.23B in revenue -- beating earlier estimates of $2.17B

And whereas only 1M active users added in the quarter (i.e. flat from Q1), it still represents a 4% growth rate -- good for the platform and good for sellers!

Now, truth be told, a good chunk of the revenue came from Stubhub (ticket sales), but it's a good leading indicator for the marketplace as a whole and the eBay management's willingness to invest in innovation and execute to deliver tangible results.

The other indicator of future growth is their continued commitment to structured data.  By structured data it is meant objective, pre-defined details that describe an item: UPC, Manufacturer, Part Number, and the like.  

eBay is saying that items with structured data convert at a rate of 10% more than those without -- a huge upside for sellers who can provide that structured data in their listings.

The good news for CommerceESB customers is that we make it easy (in fact, standard) to collect all the structured data required and include as part of the listing process.

If you need more detail on how we help your eBay listings with structured data, please ask your account manager!

The path to getting more sales on eBay can be made easier by following their guiding principles, and we make it even easier by enabling you to follow those same guidelines:

• ​Create great listings -- CommerceESB makes it easy to create great listings by consolidating almost all of the information you need: Titles, Pictures, Descriptions, and Structured Data.  See our series on Creating Effective eBay Listings to learn more.
• Minimize handling time and provide ship tracking -- CommerceESB automatically routes orders to your preferred supplier, and likewise automatically grabs ship tracking back from suppliers and uploads it to eBay.    This mimizes any delay in shipping, and ensures buyers will know when to expect shipment.
• Provide excellent customer service -- CommerceESB alleviates you of manual processes like keeping quantities in synch with suppliers and order processing, so you can spend your time delighting your customers with superior customer service or finding additional items to list.
• Avoid stock outs -- CommerceESB keeps inventory shown on eBay in synch with what your suppliers actually have on hand.  If the supplier runs out of stock (or below a threshold you designate), we will automatically end the listing (or set the quantity to zero) so you avoid stock outs.  When the supplier replenishes supply, we can automatically re-set the quantity so the items can be purchased again!  

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We take pride in enabling sellers to meet eBay's guidelines and help drive their sales.  If you are new to us, please contact us to learn more or schedule a demo!