Creating Effective eBay Listings

This is the first in a series of articles about how you can create effective eBay listings that help drive both sales and great customer experiences.

A well crafted listing will have everything a prospective buyer needs to make a purchasing decision.

In general, you want your listings to follow these guidelines:

• Place the item in the right category
• Create an descriptive title
• Include high-quality, accurate photos
• Utilize eBay's catalog when available, provide structured data when it's not
• Provide a brief, concise description

This article will focus on recommendations for titles.

The first thing to remember is that eBay allows for 80 characters in the title, including punctuation marks and spaces.  The key is to utilize these 80 characters relative to how eBay's search works (keywords buyers are typing into search).  Specific recommendations include:

• Think more about keywords than complete sentences
• Use only alpha-numeric characters.  Or, said another way, do not use characters such as &, *, @, etc.
• Use product attributes: Brand, Manufacturer, Model, Part Number, Material, etc.

Remember: after buyers enter their search terms, and eBay provides the results, the buyers are looking at the titles to see which one they should click on.  So put yourself in their shoes and present a title that will answer their primary question: "Is this the item I'm looking for?"

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!