The Top 5 Must-Haves for the Killer eBay Listing

In the next few minutes, we’ll be looking at what I currently class as the top 5 must haves for any serious eBay seller to be including in their eBay listings. Some of these you might feel as being obvious, like titles, but dig deeper and there is a fresh look on them.

#1 A Fantastic Title

I’m going to use a quote from a previous article about the SuperDryStore eBay Outlet on eBay and how wasteful their listing titles are:

The eBay listing Title is THE MOST Important Asset on eBay

Screw feedback, Screw categorisation, Screw a crappy looking listing, Screw everything.

Without a quality listing title you are knacker’ing up any chance of buyers finding you

It really is that severe and that is why #1 spot has to go to the listing title. I’m not going to cover the details on making a great eBay listing title, I’ve already done this in a previous article.

#2 Superb Images

Long gone are the days where just a poor webcam image would cut it, buyers now demand not just good images, but superb images.

Remember  it is your role to effectively describe the goods or services that you are selling and an image really does say a million words and several great quality ones, helps ensure that the customer is reassured exactly what they are buying is what they expect to receive.

While not the best images, the images in this listing do fall into the superb category because they are of a decent size, show all the angles, the product working and all bar them being linked to their originals is a pretty good job.

#3 A Professional Design

Unless you’ve been far too busy focusing IN your business lately, rather than ON your business, you can’t help but notice that there has been a huge influx of professionally (and sometimes not so professionally) designed eBay listings and eBay store designs.

From when I first started selling on eBay, it just made good sense to me to have a well structured template and a template that was well designed. In today’s ultra-competitive market, I’m just not sure you can cut it any more without one. Almost every seller that I have dealt with in the past few years has always had a design to help promote their business and their products with.

Typically, if you want to see some well designed templates, you should see the “art” section on eBay, as the majority are very gifted designers, their designs are normally very good, although the “layout” part can be lacking in some cases.

There are several companies out there who can provide such designs, I’m not going to suggest anyone in particular, because simply put, any design is better than something like the below, which involves none and usage of the H1 tag and probably a few others too:

#4 The Top Key Points About The Item

Ironically, I have to credit the seller’s description above, not because of his fantastic presentation skills, but for their use of bullet points and being able to describe their item in  a few bullet points.

I read a while back that buyers make their decision of whether to continue looking at the item or to move on within just 10 seconds of the page loading. If you’ve ever watched my partner shop, she discards listings in seconds if its not what she’s looking for.

So with this in mind, its ultra important that we not only create a keyword rich listing title so that buyers can find the goods or services, fantastic images and a layout/design to match their level, however short, punchy description that a buyer can scan read in literally seconds.

If you account that a buyer is scan reading your listings, then you can tackle this by providing them with a few (say 5) bullet points on the products features. If they are ‘hooked’ then they will read further, into descriptions and other information and then hopefully buy.

A sub note here is that you may find a specifications table useful. This is not a specifications table that you’ll find in the Computing section, which is 10 miles long, I’m referring to a shorten table where the key attributes are shown. Most buyers are looking for it to be a USV web camera, they care little on the standard or the speed, just thats USB, has a microphone and has a few settings.

Pulling this information into either a specifications table or into five or so bullet points, makes not only good sense when it comes to showing punchy information to buyers, it also ports exceptionally well to both your own website and crucially Amazon who use a five (or so) bullet points for the main product details.

There is an article I have sketched out on the importance of “portability of data” between platforms that is due to be finished in the next few weeks. However for now, take a look at the image below and note its an Amazon listing and the four bullet points. These allow for the buyer to quickly scan and make the decision.

#5 An Exit Strategy

This is something that businesses give little time or thought to. What happens if the item being viewed is not the right item? The worst case scenario of the back button being pressed or the tab closed, is going to be played time and time again if you do not plan for failure.

This could be as simple as including your eBay shop categories in the left hand bar as part of the eBay listing frame or the top search box also in the listing frame.

In more professional designs, you’ll find your eBay shop category structure included, integrated search, custom search and filtering options and in really smart listings, related items pulling dynamically using rules.

I once developed a keyword with a developer at eSellerPro that would automatically link to products in the same eBay category. Since then you can actually use scripts to dynamically pull in related and similar items using various parameters.

My point is, plan to fail, fail to plan. Know that not everyone that is going to view your item is going to buy and cater for it.