Ebay Best Match Saint or Sinner?

Here we are in the final leg of the Christmas countdown. One project we have been working on ( on behalf of someone else ) is to open their business to the magic of ebay.

After all, Christmas is nearly here and you can sell anything at Christmas ( apart from the ebay prohibited items ) on eBay! Right? Ahem. Errr, apparently not.

We've now got to go back to the client and report that we have lost £1.40 of their money in ebay listing fees and we didn't sell a bean. £ seperate auctions, 26 items spread across those auctions and sales we none. Zero. Ziltch. A duck egg. Yep thats right - nothing.

So what went wrong?

Well lets talk about the strategy we adopted first and about the things that were right ( albeit could be fine tuned later as sales progress.. ).

We'd worked in a nice little seasonal template, complete with separate sections to make the listing easier to read.

We'd looked at the previous sales listings and found two items the client sold that were selling through other sellers on ebay. Looking at the prices there was room for us to operate with those two items and return a profit. Research on one of the items showed another seller was selling around 5 per week and it we went in at the same price it would return a £15 profit on each sale or a 100% markup. We were sure that this was a good test product and this level of return would see the client with a big Christmas smile on their faces! In fact we felt that good we could almost smell the commission money and how good success would feel reporting back to the client our sales figures.

However the listing ended and we eagerly checked our reporting tool ready to call the client and tell them to get packing all the goods ready for dispatch. Alas we headed for disappointment and a long sleepless night. What the hell had gone wrong? Why didn't we even get one sale.

The morning after the night before arrived ( disappointingly we could not afford a night on refreshing beverage as the commission kitty was empty ) and we jumped on the computer to start to find out why we'd fallen foul.

1. Set the clients ebay account up correctly - check.
2. Set up a paypal account - check.
3. Include sellers terms and conditions - check.
4. Apply a returns policy ( applicable under the distance selling regulations ) - check.

The clients ebay feedback score was a low 1. Could this be the single factor that was putting people off?

As it happens probably not. We looked high and low and found 'Ebay Best Match'. Just what was this and how could it affect us.

Well - it seems in an effort to try and disuade smap listings where sellers simply list 200 items all ending within 10 minutes of each other. You must have seen all those 'Windows XP Professional - Genuine' listings where you supposedly get a product key email directly from the manufacturer? Well best match is supposed to cut through all that. In fact it's reported that the listing may not be shown at all if the best match filter cuts it out.

Now hold on a minute, I've paid my listing fee and I want my slice of cake to be for sale. Sadly it seems as it if does not work like that any more. Play by the rules or you are out. Indeed it would seem as if we were out good and proper.

The problem was our listing just was not getting first page publicity. Chances are an ebay prospect will have made a selection from one of the listings on the front page and that is then it - we've lost the sale. Naturally some would say there's lots of money to be made from all the listings that never sell and then get relisted to never sell again. Chances are if we relisted with no changes then the listing would still appear disappointingly on the second page. Even with only minutes left to run the listing was still - yes you guessed it - on the second page.

However we are not down, we're simply regrouping and researching ready to list again and hopefully this time climb above the chaff in the eyes of the best match filter.

We will report out tactics in a future article explaining what we did and how it affected our sales.

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