Since the company’s founding almost 24 years ago, eBay has grown into an eCommerce giant hosting over 25 million sellers and more than +1.1 billion live product listings – of course, these figures are continually evolving.
As a successful seller on eBay, you must attract the attention of potential customers among an enormous pool of 168 million active buyers to your products.
In this article, we list 9 tips to help eBay sellers increase their sales – and ultimately, gain higher profits at the bottom line.
Scout Similar Product Listings
By searching on eBay with keywords that correspond to your own products, you will gain insight into similar product offerings from other sellers which helps to optimize your own in terms of design, attributes, and price setting. Alternatively, take advantage of a product discovery tool that enables you to explore product listings on a global scale – and might even provide you with inspiration for your next product. Product discovery is an effective way to analyze listings, and most importantly, check pricing levels across multiple international eBay marketplaces for a specific type of product. Providing qualitative listings to your potential buyers and setting the right price for your products will ensure your competitiveness and ultimately help you to raise profit margins.
Upload new listings continually (daily at best)
Not only will regularly listing products underline your appearance as a professional seller but also, it will ensure that your products are more visible to your potential buyers. That’s due to eBay algorithms that prioritize listings in the search results measured by a rate of continuous listing uploads. In other words, you will see better results when uploading 5 items for 5 days straight, rather than listing 5 items at once on a single day.
Be transparent to your potential customers
Put yourself in your customers’ shoes. A seller who appears trustworthy and reliable will be much more likely selected for a product purchase. In order to achieve higher transparency of your product listings, we recommend adding extensive product information, as well as multiple relevant images to your listings.
Research products before listing them
Take advantage of predictive analytics to gain a competitive advantage over competing sellers. Product research provides insights into the demand level, sales estimations, and price levels of a particular product, within a specific marketplace. Moreover, carrying out product research does not only help to ensure you’re offering products on the most profitable eBay marketplace and thus increase your sales, but it could also give you inspiration for new product categories or niche market opportunities to dive into.
Provide fast responses to buyer feedback and reviews
A quick response rate and a high level of engagement with customer feedback will give your potential buyers the impression that you take feedback seriously and you’re keen on optimizing the appearance of your eBay seller profile. Almost every time a buyer makes a purchase, they will check a seller’s profile to receive information about remarks from recent buyers and the general level of customer satisfaction. Of course, a 100% positive rating is the ideal scenario, but even engaging with customer feedback that’s of negative nature, surely is better than simply neglecting it.
Offer fast and free shipping & convenient return policy
The general buyer audience certainly considers fast and free shipping as a decisive factor for distinguishing between sellers that are offering similar products. As a customer, you do not want to wait longer for receiving a product than necessary and if the shipping fee is covered by the seller, there’s really not much to think about. Moreover, offering customers the possibility to return a purchased product in case they are unsatisfied, supports your trustworthiness and shows confidence in the quality of products.
Provide qualitative listing images
You don’t get a second chance at a first impression. Product listings that contain appealing images will be much more likely a buyer’s product of choice. Especially when offering items that are equally listed by a great number of fellow sellers, it’s those details that are the decisive factor for a customer in the purchasing stage.
Include UPC codes in your eBay listings
Adding a UPC code to your listings will not only help potential customers to discover your products faster and easier on eBay but also leads to a better placement of your listing within the Google search results. If you’re not sure which UPC code corresponds to your products, try searching it on external listings or make use of an identifier conversion tool.
Choose the right eBay marketplace for your products
As obvious as it may sound, marketplace selection still represents a crucial factor why sellers on eBay may experience low turnover – the right marketplace for your protects may potentially be located on the other side of the globe from where you’re selling. Selecting the right marketplace for a given product mustn’t be based on educated guesses or mere instinct. Successful eBay sellers leverage analytics and data-driven insights provided by a product-market research tool to help them make an informed decision based on demand levels and sales estimations to reach higher profit margins.
Algopix is the leading cross-channel product market research solution to provide insight into market demand, expected profit margins and shipping costs across 16 global Amazon, eBay and Walmart marketplaces.
