Like all search engines, ebay uses a secret algorithm to determine where your item places in the results. This search engine is know as Cassini. The exact details of how Cassini ranks results are a closely guarded secret, if it was public knowledge then less honest people would be able to manipulate that information!
However, ebay have revealed some details over the years which allow us to pin point some factors you can control which influence the results; some obvious, some not so. Lets tackle the obvious first…
1. Title. Description. Category. Price.
Sure enough, the four most basic pieces of data play an important role. You have 80 characters to use in your title, make sure you use them. A title is not just the name of the product, that product may have a specific use case that someone may search for, think carefully about what someone may search for who would want this product. The same logic can be applied to your description, pack it with keywords people may search for that are connected to the product. Using the correct eBay category sounds obvious but people often don’t pay attention to this, as for price, well being the cheapest never hurts!
2. Free Shipping
Many studies have revealed that shipping cost plays a key role in closing an online purchase. ebay is aware of this and therefore slants the search results in the favour of items with free shipping.
3. Feedback
Probably the most obvious, bad feedback causes your listings to tumble down the search results. It’s not just your overall feedback score though, you have something called “Details Seller Ratings” on your feedback page (DSR’s). It’s important to focus on customer service to ensure these ratings stay high.
Now we get the more obscure factors, things you probably haven’t considered and a few which you can’t even influence…
4. Item Specifics aka Meta Data
For a long time ebay allowed you to list items with a very basic set of data, essentially a title and description. This isn’t hugely helpful to a search engine though as a computer needs to decipher whats contained in these two chunks of information. As time and technology has advanced there has been a push to utilise “meta data”, this is defined pieces of information that a computer can understand. Good examples are “Brand” or “Condition”. ebay implemented this under the friendly name of “Item Specifics” and they are heavily used by the Cassini search engine. If you don’t utilise Item Specifics you are putting yourself at an instant disadvantage.
5. Unique Content
This is something which is true not just on ebay but applies to Google search results and ranking too. Duplicating content in descriptions from other sources hurts your ranking. Ideally your descriptions should be unique to you or contain a portion of content unique to you. Ripping product descriptions from a suppliers website and pasting them into your listings puts you at a disadvantage to those writing their own descriptions. Of course if you sell huge volumes of items this can’t be helped.
6. Compliance with eBay Policies
This is something ebay have suggested in the last couple of years as they have become more proactive in enforcing policy. If your listings do not comply with requirements on active content, external links, un-secure HTTP content and are not classed as mobile friendly you will likely see your listings suppressed in the search results.
This is an area where we have spent hundreds of man hours helping our clients, cleaning their product descriptions and ensuring they are compliant. We have been able to do this because we have software developed internally that allows us to revise sellers items in bulk, sometimes revising tens or hundreds of thousands of items. This combined with a compliant listing template can have a massive effect on your performance on ebay.
All of the above are factors which you as a seller have a degree of control over. However things start to get a bit murky at this point as there are factors which you simply can’t influence
7. Sales Count aka Sales get Sales aka The double edged sword
Yes, you read that right, if an item has sold it gets a boost up the results. It’s logical, if it’s sold a thousand times it must be a relevant product. Still the logic of “to get sales I need sales” has twisted my melon for years.
8. Views. Clicks. Bids.
It’s hard to imagine how you could quantify and analyse this but Views, Clicks and Bids go into the magic calculation too. These are all used to try and establish relevance.
9. Individual user browsing/buying habits
Tin foil hat time. Yes, eBay is watching you just like every other tech company out there. Cookies are used to track the browsing habits of individual users, this combined with purchase history allows eBay to target different results at different users. If Bob only ever buys designer socks he’s not interested in a value pair for £1.99 being shown in search results right?!
So, the huge positive you can take from the above is that many of the factors that
