How To Sell on eBay as a Business

Now that Shopit is integrated with eBay, it’s important that our customers make the most of the global platform.

eBay users total 182 million around the world, with 1.4 billion products for sale at any one time.

Here, Shopit Partner Laura Mathieson of Selling Online Support delivers her Top 6 Tips on improving eBay sales – strategies that have seen her clients increase sales by an average of 22% for established businesses.

Tip Two – GET YOUR CATEGORIES RIGHT

To really understand why categories are important we need to use eBay the way buyers do. They go to the home page, type in a few words and hit search. eBay then returns a list of items for them to choose from. Now what many buyers don’t realise is that eBay often pre filters the search results – to make the buying experience better eBay will select items in the most relevant category, and that is not always an obvious choice. If your products are in a category that eBay thinks is not optimal, your products may not be shown to the buyer at all.

Here’s an example – a search for “Lego Storage Box” does not default to the “Storage Box” category, but the Lego Toys category:

Tip Three – ALWAYS USE GREAT IMAGES

Strictly speaking, good images won’t have a big impact on Cassini, unless buyers are searching using an image – then it becomes very important to have a clean photo with no added text or logos. However to achieve good sales you need to please both Bay and the buyers – and the buyers love good images – they expect them.

eBay, along with the Internet generally, prefers plain white backgrounds. And as 60% of sales on eBay are made on mobile devices, mostly smartphones, this means that the images are very small when viewed, so the Main Gallery image needs to be plain and clear without confusing buyers with props – like this:

Tip Four – DETAIL YOUR ITEM SPECIFICS

Item specifics are the extra information which eBay asks for when you create a listing.
If you are selling, for instance, a vitamin C powder, when you create the listing you will be presented with some fields to complete.eBay may ask you if you want to update your listing, based on keywords you add into your title.
And why are these necessary? Why does eBay ask for them?
The simple answer is that buyers refine their searches using Item Specifics. They select from the options given – if you have not completed the field, you will not be in the refined search results.
As a general rule, when creating a listing, if eBay asks for information it will use it.
Item specifics options are shown ringed in the example below:

Tip Five – SELLER METRICS

Seller Metrics, your level of seller status, can be found through the Seller Hub on eBay. It shows both your current status, and your upcoming status – this is evaluated around the 20th of every month. In the example below we can see that this seller is currently Top Rated, but is set to drop to Above Standard shortly.

There are only 3 levels:

• Top Rated
• Above Standard
• Below Standard

Being Top Rated will usually give you a boost in search results, and the opportunity to save money on fees through the Premium Service Badge, but it’s the Below Standard status you need to be really wary of. This will result in dramatic drops in search results and additional fees, so it needs to be avoided.