More about Dave Snyder (@listranksell)…
Main selling platform
eBay
How long have you been selling?
12 years
Your most impressive selling stat?
Increase in YOY impressions for client of 523.1%.
What platform is your favorite?
eBay
What’s one thing you wish you knew when you first started selling?
A listing could be fully optimized for search, and not just conversions.
What’s one hack you can’t sell without?
I don’t utilize “hacks.”
Overview
In episode twenty one, of The Seller Community Podcast, back by SUPER popular demand, we have a continued conversation with Dave Snyder, Founder and Chief Analyst of List Rank Sell (www.listranksell.com), a search engine optimization agency dedicated solely to the eBay marketplace. We also have the news, and a seller question!
The Seller Community Podcast from List Perfectly is the #1 resource for the seller community across all platforms and hub for information on growing your business with List Perfectly. Find out more at thesellercommunitypodcast.com/podcast, leave a message or ask a question at https://anchor.fm/sellercommunitypodcast, or email us at podcast@thesellercommunitypodcast.com.
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Links
thesellercommunitypodcast.com/podcast
Listperfectly.com
Seller Community Podcast on Anchor
Listperfectly Facebook Group
coloradoreworn Instagram
coloradoreworn linktree
snoop.dougie Instagram
snoop.dougie linktree
listperfectly Instagram
Episode 21 Links
listranksell.com
listranksell LinkedIn
listranksell Twitter
The eBay SEO Interview that Caused a Stir
list rank sell blog
eBay Tech Blog
keyword.io
keyword dominator
Terapeak
How to become a Posh Ambassador
Transcript
Intro
Doug:
Welcome to episode 21 of the seller community podcast, Liz. Twenty-one! We did it!
Liz:
We did it!
Doug:
Twenty is the milestone, 21! We’re still going.
Liz:
Just don’t see. It’s all downhill from here.
Doug:
No, no, it’s all uphill from here.
Liz:
It’s all uphill from here.
Doug:
That’s right. All right. Well, we had an action packed week.
Liz:
We really did! We’re coming off of the 4th of July weekend. Did you do anything fun?
Doug:
Yes. We went to some friends and saw some fireworks and were there like a long time. It was very fun.
Liz:
Good! Yeah. I was just thinking, you know, back to last 4th of July, I think everybody was pretty miserable. A definite time to celebrate and be with people and just enjoy the day and you know, our plans got, eh, my husband’s father’s day gift, a nice big smoker grill was delayed and finally delivered. He got it put up and it rained. It just poured down rain. So we’re like, okay, well this was the day before. So we’re like, okay, we’ll just do it for the 4th of July. We’re good outside getting ready. We had like two hailstorms run through last night. But it stopped just in time to break in the father’s day gift for the 4th of July.
Doug:
The Trager smoker?
Liz:
No, no, no. It’s a smoker and gas grill. We have a small Trager, but we needed a combo. So it was a father’s day gift for him, but it was really a gift for me to get him excited so I don’t have to cook dinner.
Doug:
That’s right, now and again.
Liz:
Exactly!
Doug:
Did I tell you about the griddle we got?
Liz:
What did you get?
Doug:
We got one of those insane, like 70 square foot griddles, like in a restaurant, but they’re the thing now and you just griddle stuff and so it’s stand alone. So we’re going to have the griddle. We’re also going to have the barbecue at the new place. And so we can do, you know, *clink, clink, clink* like hibachi stuff. Like if you and John were there, I could throw shrimp into your mouths.
Liz:
Well that’s perfect. We’re on our way!
Doug:
I know you love the onion volcano.
Liz:
Oh yeah! There you go.
Doug:
We can do that, but 70 square feet of cooking space. So we’re very excited about that. That’s probably the first thing we’ll use in the new house.
Liz:
So it sounds like as you anticipate finally closing and getting able to move into your new house, that you’re currently filling up a storage unit of fun things to enjoy your new place.
Doug:
Yeah. Another storage unit. Okay. Yeah. We’ve got that. We bought actually bought a couple of recliners, nice recliners. So something new for me to sleep in. I mean, not that I sleep on the couch, I’m just saying, to fall asleep in! While I’m reading or watching movies.
Liz:
Or editing the podcast. (laughing).
Doug:
But that’s cool. No, 4th of July was fun. Got together with friends, old friends, met some new people, hung out. All American type of stuff.
Liz:
We have family coming into town next weekend. So my mother-in-law, my brother-in-law, my nieces. We get to spend time with them. And what I really love about it is, you know, I think when you live in a cool place, like here in Colorado, there’s a lot of cool stuff to do outside in the summertime, but we kind of get behind our desks or in our office working, and we just kind of forget about the cool stuff outside. So it’s always fun to be a tourist in your own city. So I’m kind of looking forward to that.
Doug:
It is lovely there. But you’ve got hail season. We are in fire season, Liz. So, flee from hail? Fleet from a fire? I don’t know. Have your papers ready either way.
Liz:
Yes!
Doug:
I’m Doug.
Liz:
And I’m Liz.
Doug:
Back by super popular demand, Dave Snyder joins us this week for a continued conversation about eBay SEO and helps dispel some of those SEO myths, Liz. It’s touted as eBay SEO, but there are a lot of good practices you can use across the board.
Liz:
It is a deep dive into eBay, SEO. You really learn a lot, but yeah, I am super excited for our listeners to be able to hear this continued conversation. One of our most listened to episodes and one of the episodes that people keep asking about, like follow up questions. So, hopefully we’ll get to some of those.
Doug:
And it’s one of those things too, is like, listen to the advice, take it. If you want to take it, take it. If you don’t, don’t. Like we always say, do what works for you! But these are some good tips and it’s research backed. And Dave, you know, he’s well connected at eBay. He follows the eBay SEO tech blog. He’s really up on all those releases and all that info. And it’s really data backed stuff that he’s talking about. Google, eBay, tech blog, and then you can see a lot of the deeper, a lot of it is geared towards programmers and people like Dave, and it’s a lot of stuff that maybe is going to be too deep for most sellers. But it’s interesting just to take a look at.
Liz:
Or you can be like me and I go to ListRankSell.com and I click on blog because Dave will blog about it. Or I can go to Twitter and follow him there at List Rank Sell or go to LinkedIn. He just breaks it down.
Doug:
That’s right. Yeah. He explains it for us. What else do we have Liz?
Liz:
We’ll have the news and we’ll answer a seller question. The seller community podcast is produced by List Perfectly every week for your enjoyment and show notes are found at thesellercommunitypodcast.com/podcast.
Speaker 1:
All right, let’s get back into it with Dave Snyder talking eBay SEO and SEO.
eBay Listing Optimization
Liz:
Today, we’re welcoming. Dave Snyder back to the show. You may remember Dave from episode eight, our very first eBay SEO conversation. So if you’re not familiar with Dave, you have to listen to his first episode, go back and listen to episode eight. Dave is the Founder and Chief Analyst for List Rank Sell, an SEO firm that specializes in eBay SEO. So we covered so much in episode eight. We have so many more questions from the community. Dave, welcome back. Thank you so much for joining us again.
Dave:
Thanks for having me back.
Liz:
So, you know, Dave, we talked a lot on your first appearance. Your episode was extremely popular, still is–and our most downloaded episode. we had multiple requests to have you back. So you also recently ran a blog post called “The eBay SEO Interview That Caused a Stir,” which we will link in the show notes. And let’s talk about that a little bit leading into your follow-up interview.
Dave:
Yeah, I was surprised a little bit. I expected people to be interested because there’s really no one that we’ve talked to that’s not interested in this subject at all. I was pleasantly surprised. I mean, when you started telling me how people were responding to it, that’s great. Cause I had kind of set it aside because just going to get back to work and I don’t get a lot of opportunities to talk about this subject and I kind of just went off and, you know, spoke what was coming to my mind and I thought, well, you know, that was okay. Didn’t necessarily think it was the greatest interview. I mean, you know, you don’t look at yourself and go, oh, that, that was great. You know, I don’t generally anyways, I was kinda like, okay. And so yeah, very, very, grateful for the opportunity obviously. But then also I love talking about it.
Liz:
It’s a very important subject and I think sellers are very keen, especially nowadays, you know, we hear SEO get thrown around everywhere and sometimes you’ll ask people, well, what’s SEO? And they’re like, “oh…I don’t…t’s SEO,” but, but they know it’s important, but they don’t know what it is. And we’re hearing a lot more about it in the community and to have somebody such as yourself that has been doing this for years upon years, upon years, that do deep research, and this is what you do every single day. It’s a treat to hear like somebody that is in this every day and not just somebody saying, “oh, well I did this once, and it worked…”
Dave:
The first time I tested SEO on eBay was a printer cable. It was made by Compaq. And, it was called a parallel port. This is the old type of okay. Okay. And that word “old” is very important. I used the parallel port description. I took numbers off of the side of the cable. I put the brand in all this stuff, couldn’t get it to sell. And this was even before I started doing actual keyword research, I thought “who would buy this cable?” It’d be like, my Dad would have like an old printer. Right. I put “old printer cable” in the title and in like 24 hours, it’s sold. Right. So I kind of thought, okay, there’s something to this. This is even before sort of testing technically. But I realized at that point that obviously that same connection between what your buyers or your searchers are searching and what is in your title have to be the same.
Dave:
One of the issues with the seller community is that there is an assumption that the one change you make is what resulted in the result that you got. Right. Okay. There are many, many things taking place all at the same time, especially if you are selling things that people want. So people are linking to you, whether you know it or not, they’re finding you in Pinterest, finding you all over the internet. If what you’re selling, no one’s paying any attention to, and you’re not getting really much engagement then it’s possible then that, that you can definitely connect those two things. But what one of the biggest challenges is, markets change. We were working with a seller of men’s ties and it just happened that during the six months of our campaign, the size of the men’s ties market in eBay UK tripled. Okay. And so, I mean, literally the total number of listings that appeared for men’s ties tripled in that time. And so if you aren’t paying attention to that sort of thing, and you look at your listings and go, “why aren’t my men’s ties selling?” A significant change can take place fairly quickly in a market sometimes overnight, almost. And those things are oftentimes things that you aren’t tracking. You don’t know about the automatic assumption I did such and such this happened. And those two aren’t necessarily connected. They might be, but it’s very hard to prove it may not have constant. One of the main things that needs to be understood is that if you take a single SEO technique and you apply it to your listings, you may or may not see a significant change right away. And you may not see much of a change at all.
Dave:
SEO is meant to be practiced as a whole. So when we go into a campaign, typically we’re working with a seller, that’s got a lot of problems. In fact, we have turned clients down because pretty much their listings are okay. But when we can tell there’s a lot of room for improvement here. And if we go in and we optimize their categories through item specifics and their titles, we are going to see a significant improvement. Okay. And I just, I just know that from experience, and then I can look at another store and go, “eh, not so much,” there really isn’t that much room. So on the one hand, it’s like, good news. Your SEO is pretty solid, bad news. You’re not going to see much change. If we go in and tweak things, if you already kind of know what you’re doing, you’re already one of those sellers who spends a lot of time cultivating your titles, for example, and you actually are doing some genuine keyword research.
Dave:
Our algorithm will show us what keyword phrases particular to that item are most likely to, to surface that listing in search, it might help you, but unless there’s like a smoking gun which sometimes we find where there’s a term that buyers are searching in droves and most sellers are avoiding for whatever reason. Then when that term is searched, our client’s listings, cause hopefully our client has a bunch of listings like that. We actually discovered this with a seller of metal detectors. They sold these long range, metal detectors, which can see long distances. But the term long range is not a very strong term for search. Okay. It’s used consistently by competitors, but it’s not searched often enough to make it a strong term, but there’s another term. That means the same thing. And no one was practically, we’re talking like five sellers.
Dave:
We’re using that. And our client had like 30 of these. Okay. And you know, they sell between $15,000 and $20,000. They’re very expensive detectors. And so when you search that phrase, our clients’ listings just dominated the page. So sometimes we will discover a term like that. And that, that we, you know, then we know this, you know, this is part of the puzzle. If what you’re intending to do is to test out this technique and see what happens, test out this technique, then you’re wasting your time because that’s not how it was meant to be applied. Okay. SEO has to be done holistically. So when we go in, it’s very rare that we just do one aspect. We’ve been asked for it by specific clients and in the right situation, we’ll do it. But it’s rare that we do that. What we do is we fully optimize as many listings as we can during the time that they’ve paid for those listings are completely optimized.
Dave:
Not just, oh, we tweak the titles. So what most sellers I feel do is they tweak something and then watch. And then they prove to themselves, this was worthless. And I don’t know why you would do that. I know why you would spend your time at all. If you’ve already determined that this probably isn’t going to work, don’t bother with it. If you’re already fairly happy with your sales, don’t worry about SEO because you’re just going to drive yourself nuts. SEO is really only for super, super serious sellers who are willing to pay for it. Yes. I can give people advice. And yes, people have said, wow, our sales doubled because of what you told us, those listings were really, really bad. Okay. If they only made one change and their sales doubled, then the listings were already so bad that perhaps a change that wasn’t SEO related could have resulted in a similar result. Traditionally impressions, which has the visibility of the listing is so suppressed that when we go in and optimize the whole thing, six months in working with the company that invented, what’s known as a train horn, which is a truck horn, it sounds like a train. They invented this. They’ve got great brand awareness. People know their products, but you just couldn’t find them in search. Okay.
Liz:
Cause their listings were that bad.
Dave:
Well listings their listings were actually…So from a conversion point of view, like they, they actually have their description. You can click on a button that will let you hear the horn because every horn sounds different. You know, they’ve great photographs, no issues along any of those lines–pricing, they’re really reasonably priced, but you could not find them in search. So in that setting so that their SEO sucked and you’re not, you’re not going to know most of that in that setting visibility increased by over 500% year, over year, six months into the project and sales net sales were up like 240% gross sales, like 180%. That’s a fairly typical result. When we’re working with someone on a hands-on basis, long-term, they can’t find their listing in search well, but everything else is kind of in place. Cause we don’t do conversion. Like we don’t tweak images. We only work on the listings from a search point of view. So most sellers who maybe listened to this podcast are assuming that, okay, if I pick that one technique, he gave us, that’s going to result in huge increases in sales. It didn’t, it doesn’t work. That’s not how SEO is meant to be applied.
Liz:
So this is what I’m hearing: SEO isn’t changing a title or changing a category or changing item specifics or changing a price. It’s a culmination of all of it into a package.
Dave:
Yes. And it’s also not about regularly tweaking those things. The seller community is inundated with this concept in their heads that they’re supposed to be regularly tweaking existing listings. And what sellers really ought to be doing is increasing the size of their stores. More important than tweaking existing listings. When we optimize a store, we do not worry about single listings. We may optimize like most of our clients have large categories where there’s a hundred different types of sandpaper, for example. And we optimize all of those. Some of them are going to respond. Some of them aren’t, we don’t worry about the ones that don’t, what we’re looking at is the overall result from the work we’ve done. What a lot of sellers do is they optimize a single listing and, and see what happens as though SEO doesn’t really work that way. Okay. It’s very much holistic.
Dave:
If you’ve only got 15 listings or 20, let’s say you’ve got a hundred, not enough. We won’t optimize anything under 250 and we don’t even have to optimize all of them. If you have 50 listings and they are in a store of 500, those 50 listings will sell better by themselves than a store of the same 50 listings that only have those 50 listings. I don’t know what the relationship is. I’ve never been able to determine it, but just the sheer number of listings will impact the sales of single listings. So I mean, it’s obvious that if you have more listings, you sell more, but that group of listings will actually do better in a store on eBay. If you have more. So if you’ve got a great product and you’ve got five different versions of it and you’re going to list those on Amazon, they may very well sell, not going to happen on, on anything.
Dave:
And it’s very, very rare if it ever takes place. More than worrying about why something hasn’t sold, if you pretty much know what you’re doing from a conversion point of view, you know how to price your photographing. Well, et cetera, then I would just increase your store size, do not change what we’ve done. Okay. And I’ve seen this countless times in the beginning where I would get hired and I would be one freelancer in a line of freelancers. And I would go back and just kind of check my work and find that they had changed everything. Okay. And then I have even been contacted by clients like that. Again, could you fix these? Leave them alone because we chose those terms for a reason. We’re not testing those terms. Okay. We’re not testing them again, saying, “oh, if we use this word, will it help itself?”
Dave:
Okay. We did our research. We know what our buyers are searching for this item. Those are the terms we used. You optimize it and then you leave it. It’s a cycle. So just changing keywords, you’ll start to show up for some phrases you weren’t showing up for before. If you’re doing your buyer, if you’re doing your keyword research, that will help you just appear more often. That should then turn back to maybe a couple of sales. As it sells better, it will start to rank better. As it ranks better, it’ll start to sell better. That’s obviously multi quantity. And that’s what we worked on a hands-on basis. But that’s how the process works. When you optimize a listing, if you go back and change it, this was the category. It was supposed to begin. You did your research. You know what the category is, don’t change the category. We are being told by the community, tweak your listings. Why?
Liz:
So I’ve got a question, but what about when those listings go stale? Talk to me about stale listings.
Dave:
I did an article of stale listings that got a lot of attention in Google because it’s such a hot topic still. Stale listings don’t exist. Okay. So they do and they don’t. A listing does not grow stale over time on the sheer basis of how long it’s been on this site. Like we mentioned before, if it has grown stale, it was stale to begin with. There’s something wrong with it to start with. It’s a very complex topic for sellers because they believe that well, it’s been on the site too long and that’s why it’s not ranking. Well, it’s not ranking well, because there’s something wrong with it. What will happen is the listing will go down in search. Right? And so they tweak it and then maybe they see a bit of a boost and then it goes back down again. Then they tweak it again.
Dave:
Okay. Whatever their tweak is. I don’t know. Um, and of course this all comes down to what keyword phrases you’re testing. I have to show up at the top of search for a two word phrase, right? And there’s 200,000 of these for sale on eBay, generally impossible to do unless you’re paying for ads and it’s not necessary to do if you, if you actually spend the time optimizing your listings. So from a tweaking point of view, when you optimize something, you truly optimize it. It needs time. The search engine needs time to respond to what you’ve done. And you’re looking at a minimum of 90 days, but a search engine to properly respond to what you’ve done. One of the reasons why people do so poorly on eBay is because they constantly tweak, okay. They didn’t believe in the change they made in the first place.
Dave:
Okay. If you believed in that change, stick to it. If you have a reason to believe, not just, it came out of your head, okay, asking yourself is a myth. You don’t know what your buyers are searching until you research it. You need a tool that digs into eBay’s autocomplete, which is their database collects the used by your buyers keyword tool like, keyword tool.io has a free version that sellers can use. It gives you about two thirds of the keywords that are available. Keyword Tool Dominator, which is the one that we use gives you pretty much everything. And that’s the one that we prefer, it’s a one-time fee. Those dig into the keywords that your buyers….so let’s say you’re selling a Charlie Brown figure you would put “Charlie Brown figure” into the tool and see what people are searching in addition to that term.
Dave:
And you’d be quite entered, you know, whether they’re searching by material or by size, perhaps you want to know exactly what your buyers are searching. I’ll give you a great example. A client of ours sells used wheel rims and the phrase five lug or four lug is one of the most important terms from a search point of view. Not something I would have ever thought of myself. I would think like alloy would be an important term. It’s not even searched from most of the wheel rims that we researched. So we are using the term alloy. Okay. But you do have to have wheel rim in every title because eBay is still quite dependent in some ways on exact match, which means you have to have the exact term. So if someone searches wheel rim and you don’t have both words, you’re not going to appear.
Dave:
And that’s not the case for other terms. We work with a client that sells antique Bibles and the term antique actually eBay can get that term from the item specifics that’s called relevant recall. Okay. So it does, it is that technology eBay uses to take certain terms from your item specifics, but unless you know exactly how to test for that, you just want to stick with what your buyers are searching, leave those and use those keywords. If I know that my buyers are searching, you know, 1900 illustrated antique Bible, blah, blah, blah. I know what they’re searching specifically. Why would I go back and change those keywords? Okay. The only reason why you would continue to do that is if you don’t know what you’re doing in the first place, you’re just testing things. Oh, maybe this works, maybe that’ll work. If that’s what you’re doing, forget SEO, because you will never make SEO work. And that, that really has to be stressed. It’s an industry. It’s a practice. It’s a science. It, you know, people say it’s more of an art than a science. No, it’s a science. It’s a science. It’s absolutely a science.
Liz:
I’m gonna backup just a second. Cause I want to make sure people heard what you said when you’re talking about these keyword tools and these keyword tools are giving you what buyers are searching. I think that’s very important. It’s giving you what buyers are searching, not what is existing on the website.
Dave:
eBay itself will frequently recommend Terapeak as a keyword tool. It is not a keyword tool. It’s a product research tool. It’s a great product research tool. We use it all the time, but we do not use it for keywords. Just because a seller is selling well, does not mean that every keyword in that title is a good keyword for search. Some of them had to have been, but the only way you’re going to know which ones were, is to do the research in terms of what the buyers are actually searching. It’s quite common to see terms that, you know, people aren’t searching. I had a conversation with a guy who used to work for eBay on LinkedIn a while back, who had a cat toy that was selling really well. And it was simply a paper green…it was a green paper mat. It’s like a grass looks like grass that are a one use only thing.
Dave:
And it was like selling for three pounds free shipping. And it sold so well because it was so cheap. And so it ranked really well. Well, Terapeak, you know, you look at that go, oh, well, these must be good keywords. He didn’t even have the term cat mat in the title. He was trying to show up for cat toys. That’s what he wanted to show up for. He had free postage in his title. He had a whole slew of keywords in that were not getting him found at all. Within a week or two of that conversation I went back and looked and he was no longer to be seen. Okay. He was at the top, like the third in organic search and eBay UK for a short time. And then he was gone. So this guy’s going to go back and tweak, “what did I do wrong?”
Dave:
Well, if he knew what he was doing from the beginning, if he described the item, if he went and did his keyword research around cat mats or cat grass mat or whatever the entity is, cause it’s not just a cat toy, it’s a very specific kind of cat toy. And you’ve got to know what that is, and then build your keywords around that. Okay. So are they, are they searching by the color for example? Cause it was green. If they’re not, don’t bother putting green in the title. Okay. You’ve got to put green in the item specifics for sure. But you only want to use the terms that your buyers are actually searching for that item and you’d be shocked at what kind of results that will have, but simply going in and going, “oh, well that listing was using this term. That must be a good term for search.” You don’t know that.
Liz:
And I found this really interesting. I did a little bit of research, and this is surface research. It just as an example, it was, it was something probably like a LuluLemon men’s tank top. And one of the keywords that was recommended was marathon. I wouldn’t put marathon in a men’s tank top. But apparently it was a running tank. Top marathon was a keyword because it may, I don’t know, it could have been a marathon season. It could’ve been, maybe that’s a search term that people look for when they run in marathons.
Dave:
Right. So you would have to then know just because some tools suggested it here’s something else. When we get into a client relationship, we will find everything being searched for that product type. Okay. We will mine everything we can find. And we’ve got a process we use to get as many keyword phrases. We can, we then sort that with our algorithm. And then we look at the top 100 and we talk to our client to make sure like for the metal detectors, there was a pretty popular phrase, junior medley tech. So we needed to know are any of the metal detectors that you sell, are they considered junior? Okay. You have to know for sure before you just, “oh, that’s a good term for search start, start using it.” Okay.
Liz:
That’s such a great point.
Dave:
So you would have to know that that was used for example, is there a marathon style? So if there’s a marathon style and you can confirm that this is a marathon style, therefore yeah. That’s probably a good term for search, but just because it’s searched with your core phrase, the entity, what the thing is doesn’t mean that it applies to what you’re selling. So that’s also like a big misnomer is, well it’s, you know, people search it. Yeah. But does it, does it describe what you’re selling? Because it won’t get right what your selling tool to sell, unless it describes it.
Liz:
Right. Cause you can, I can get people to my listing with marathon in the tank top. But if it’s just a casual, leisure cotton tank top…
Dave:
If it’s not a marathon tank top, you’re going to upset them and they’re gonna go somewhere else.
Liz:
And that conversion is going to just go down. I mean, it’s true, right?
Dave:
Yes. Correct.
Liz:
Because people aren’t going to want to buy it.
Dave:
Conversion rate, that’s another kind of, there’s too much attention applied to the conversion rate. You’re not so much concerned about the conversion rate in that case. You’re concerned about losing the buyer. You’re concerned about the fact that maybe that buyer would have bought something else from you, a different kind of tank top, but so you’ve got other tank tops, but they went away because you just spammed the search engine. Okay. That’s actually a violation of eBay search manipulation policy. Okay. So you do not want to ever put a term in your title that does not distinctly describe the item. Now, not every word that describes the item is going to be good for search. Okay. So you may have terms that describe the item that people aren’t searching. You don’t want to use those, but every term you do use has to describe exactly the thing you’re searching, or they may be kind of general phrases that people are searching.
Dave:
You know, we were doing this set of watches and it turns out that including in the title, things like, for men, for women are actually quite important. But if someone searches certain terms and waterproof was another one, even though it’s in the item specifics, eBay may not currently be looking to the item specifics for that term. You may want to put like a very specific thing that differentiates that watch. But if that’s not the most important terms being searched for that watch, you want to use those terms. A keyword tool dominator has a ranking process. It ranks the most important to least important, and it’s not bad it’s I like ours better obviously, but it is something that if you use it, it will kind of rank them from most important to least important. Sometimes the general terms are very important, essential to have in your title, but back to the sales conversion rate, not a single patent that I’ve read ever references the conversion rate in his description of eBay’s algorithm.
Dave:
And there’ve been a lot of patents written about the algorithm. I just read one and tweeted it from the List Rank Sell account, like last week on eBay’s ranking factor and very interesting stuff in that patent. But what’s interesting is that clicks are an engagement factor according to the patents. That’s one of the reasons why I would never manually, I wouldn’t end and relist because even, and I definitely want to talk about that topic, but everyone says, “oh, you know, if you tank your sales conversion rate, you’re gonna need to…” Everyone believes that. And it’s logical. Okay. It’s very logical to think. And I’ve read it from very reputable sources. People that I respect even have written that, but I haven’t actually been able to bear that out with testing. And we don’t actually worry too much about either this.
Dave:
So in a successful SEO campaign, the click-through rate is going to stay the same typically or even go down because the click-through behavior rather is not necessarily keep up with the increased visibility. So the clients that we work with, their visibility is so low that the visibility just skyrockets and the natural interest in the item necessarily can’t necessarily keep up. This is a very consistent, reality with, you know, I’ve been testing this since the beginning that, you know, the very first time I saw it, it scared me to death. You know, why is the rate going down? Sales conversion rate on the other hand will tend to increase, will tend to increase gradually. If you’re working with a practitioner who focuses on conversions, let’s say you’ve got terrible photos and they improve your photos, your sales conversion rate is probably going to go up a lot more than it would in an SEO campaign. And because SEO doesn’t focus on conversions, okay, it will increase your sales. We tend to see the biggest increases in impressions and sales and transactions. Conversion rate will tend to gradually increase, but we don’t really worry about it. We’re more concerned about did our bottom line improve?
Liz:
Did we get the sales? That’s what it boils down to, did I make a sale?
Dave:
People will say “don’t send traffic to your listing that doesn’t convert because it will bring the conversion rate down.” I wouldn’t worry about that. I would get it as visible to as many people that could potentially be interested in it as possible. Don’t get visibility for visibility sake. Okay. Don’t do that. You, you know, but that’s kinda just logical, get the eyeballs on the listing that people are actually interested in. Don’t worry about your conversion rate.
Liz:
I have like a hundred different thoughts right now. Like if you can see my brain right now, it looks like one of those chalk boards with like writing all over it, because, but that just leads me to exactly what I hear constantly or kind of this thing with item specifics. And I would imagine item specifics, play into SEO.
Dave:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so item specifics flow from the category and the category has to be correct first. If it’s not the item specifics, won’t be right. Okay. Now they are changing things. So that, like, for example, let’s say I’m selling an automotive product. I select brand that brand field is pretty much the same field, regardless of what category I’m in. But if you know, we had a client that was selling the wheels, they had their category in the wrong, their wheels in the wrong category. When we put them back to wheels, suddenly the item specifics change, obviously, and now they can appear in the filters in search that applied to those items, specifics, the company software, the CMS they’re using, content management system they’re using to create their listings and like send listings from platform to platform decided that it was best to put the brand in all caps.
Dave:
Okay. But the dropdown menu does not have it in all caps. eBay will not read that. So PONTIAC in all caps is not the same as Pontiac with just the letter P capitalized. You must use the drop down menu. If you type in your own content, you will not, even if it’s just a change to it, you will not appear in that filter. It won’t happen. The main purpose of item specifics, and it’s not about getting them all. Okay. So there’s this misnomer that you’ve got to fill in the whole blue circle and Harry Temkin, you know, has changed Helix, which is the name given to the new unified listing tool. That’s going to be the only tool in time. It now shows what looks more like an RPM meter instead of that lightening gauge with the blue circle. And to make it a little bit more obvious that you, you don’t have to have the blue circle to appear at all.
Dave:
You don’t. Each filter that you feel in is going to let you show up for….so let’s say that I’m selling the wheel and I type into wheel diameter, I type in 16.0. Okay. The option isn’t 16.0, it’s 16. Okay. So I’m not going to appear, I can do 16 points here. Let’s say you’re selling green t-shirts and it’s a neon green t-shirt and you type in neon green, someone filters by green. You won’t appear. Okay. We call that listing displacement. Okay. I want to get that term out there. Listing displacement is when you disappear from search, because generally speaking, because of the application of a filter and you didn’t optimize for that filter, this happens on the category level when you’re in, not in eBay’s backend category. And this happens on the item specifics level, when you’ve either typed in your own information, which sometimes you have to do okay.
Dave:
So, you know, but there’s all kinds of examples that I like to give on how a client has not wanted us to use the word plastic when they wanted acrylic in the title. Okay. If acrylic isn’t one of the options and you type in acrylic, no matter what material someone filters by, you’re not going to appear in search. Okay? You have to choose whatever eBay’s giving you. And that’s how you appear. The item specifics in your listing apply to this filter of the same name in eBay search. So when someone then filters by whatever, and you’ve selected that from the dropdown menu, that’s how you know that you’re going to appear. And for everyone that you fill in, you will appear for that filter. It’s filtered by filter. So if you only do one, if someone filters by that particular filter in search, you will appear.
Dave:
Even if you haven’t done any of the others. Right. Okay. Even if you chose the least important one, I don’t know why you would do that, but let’s just say you did that. It’s not going to hurt you if you only have done one. Now, I don’t know why anybody would only do one, but let’s just say for that, the only time you’ve got right now with your listings is 30 minutes a day. And you’ve got 2,000 listings. Once you’ve determined backend category. From that point, your item specifics are going to be the most important thing. And you would do the top most item specifics, probably in every listing. That’s going to help you for those filters. You will show up for those. You don’t have to get every single one filled in, be found in search for the filters that you did fill the item specific out for.
Liz:
So I’m going to just back up really quick second and tell people, we talked a lot about the backend category in episode eight, seriously, like we went in depth about this. So go back and listen to that. Listen about the orange Bronco shirt and get, and how, why categories are specific. We could probably talk about it another hour, but that information already exists, go back and listen to episode eight about that. But what I really like, and just to clarify, so item specifics for those that don’t know, when you are filling out your listing, they are in order of importance. So there will be a number on top of that. And that is how many times people have actually used the filter. So, what you’re doing when you are pulling that, pull down menu for item specifics, what happens is think like a buyer, you go on eBay and search for a t-shirt. I want a purple V-neck short sleeve t-shirt. I’m just going to type in t-shirt because I just want a t-shirt right. Or a purple t-shirt on the left-hand side as a buyer, I can choose V-neck. I can choose purple. Those filters only show the pull-down menu. So if you put fuchsia and I click purple, right, your listing will not be shown to me. And that is what’s called what was that?
Dave:
Displacement. So it’s displaced from search. It’s not bumped down. It’s missing. It’s been re it’s been removed. And so, and, and that’s, that’s purposeful. Okay. That’s uh, that’s what makes marketplace search so beautiful. Is that on Google? If I want to look for a black Metallica t-shirt I have to type in every single thing that I want to be part of that list to be part of what I see. Whereas within a marketplace, the filter system is meant to filter out the irrelevant listings. Okay. But you have to optimize for that. All right. If you haven’t properly optimized for it, you’re going to be one of the irrelevant listings, even though you’re not, this is to make buyer search better. Now. There are issues with item specifics and there are, there are going to be for some time yet.
Dave:
I think long-term, they’re going to get this right because these changes are tied specifically into the changes that they’re making with the backend category, which means they’re filtering specifically to a single category. And if you’re not in that category, even though it might not be the one you think it ought to be in, if eBay says, that’s the one that goes in, that’s the one that goes in, but that data is called buyer demand data. So that number of searches is from the last 30 days. And it’s the buyer demand data simply says, this filter was used this many times over the last 90 days. So, you know, you can literally, in some cases, increase your visibility by a million potential views. If you simply complete your item specific.
News and a Seller Question
Liz:
So now that your brain is in high-drive, thinking about everything in your eBay store that you could be changing or updating, or the time that you can save by optimizing your listings. We’ll just kind of decompress that for a minute, let it go in, and let’s get on with it. Some news.
Doug:
Yeah. You might have to, a lot of people listen to the Dave stuff more than once. And keep in mind, you’ve got the transcript, too. So you can go through that. If you like to read along or take notes directly from that.
Liz:
I have actually gone back when a seller has had a question in one of the Facebook groups, I’ve actually gone back to our transcript, control, left, searched it, and found what Dave had to say about it. And it’s been so useful.
Doug:
That’s what it’s for. All right. What do you have this week? Liz? We’ve got something from Poshmark?
Liz:
Yeah, so I found this really interesting. Poshmark ambassador badges will be rolling out starting July 6th. So keep an eye on it. If you don’t have it yet, keep an eye on it, refresh your app. They’re rolling out. So, they will be adding special badges to your closet to recognize and celebrate your status and mentorship in the community.
Doug:
That is cool.
Liz:
So it kind of reminds me of like an eBay top rated seller badge.
Doug:
And so that whole concept comes from, you know, like community and social media. It’s called gamification. Some people hate it. Some people love it, but the idea is they’re giving you a little recognition. So some people love that recognition. You know, they give you this badge, they give you this recognition. It makes you stand out a bit and it can help you with stuff. But I guess part of this too, is with these ambassador badges, not only does it display on your profile, your closet, and so that shows other people that you’re part of this program. It also makes you stand out to Poshmark. So if they’re looking for people to do something, they’re probably going to look at the ambassadors, those types of people. And what they’re really doing is they’re identifying their super users to help them run their community. But what’s also cool about this is they can do stuff like this too, to incentivize you to do certain things, certain things they like you to do that help the community help Poshmark. But you also get stuff from it. So what else do you get or being a Poshmark ambassador Liz?
Liz:
There’s a lot of benefits to being a Poshmark ambassador. And I’m going to kind of get into this in a second, but, you get recommended to new Poshers. Every day there are new Poshmark buyers coming to the Poshmark app.
Doug:
Yeah.
Liz:
When you’re new to something, you tend to go towards a trusted seller or something verified or an ambassador. So that may help set you apart from somebody that’s not a Poshmark ambassador and you can receive an exclusive newsletter. So you’ll be getting firsthand information. We all know this information travels super-fast, but you can be one of the first ones before it hits Instagram in 26 seconds and unlock access to fund programs and opportunities. So one of these is Poshmark campaigns. So you have to be a Poshmark ambassador to do campaigns. There’s all kinds of different campaigns. Post to your Facebook, do a story. I’ve never participated. Okay, I’m a Poshmark ambassador, never participated in a campaign.
Doug:
Hmm. Alright.
Liz:
Not my style, not my deal. However, last week Poshmark had one, if you list in the pets category, they give you a $25 site credit. You only had to list. You didn’t have to sell. So I had two things listed in the pets category and I have no more pet items to sell. So I went to List Perfectly, I delisted those two pet items and I relisted them and I copied and pasted one of the URLs. Because it was a new listing.
Doug:
Very nice!
Liz:
And I got my $25 credit.
Doug:
So they incentivized you to list. So this is this type of thing. It’s a reciprocal relationship. They’re getting you to do something. You’re helping them out. But what I really learned with the influencer work I did at eBay is influencers, sellers, seller influencers, they want information and access. And that’s what this type of stuff is all about. It’s like you get information, you get access, but you’re also incentivized again to list and to participate in these campaigns. And that helps Poshmark.
Liz:
You know, I’m a part of a lot of different communities, but one of the things that I see is newer sellers on the app will get really excited. “Oh my gosh, I’m halfway to ambassador status!” And you’ll get 95% people saying “Oh my gosh, that’s great. Keep going!” And then the other 5%,” I don’t know why you’re trying. It’s not going to help you.” It will help you! And this is kind of one of the reasons why. So if you’re new to Poshmark and you are excited, I mean, it’s a milestone. So yes, if you are a new Poshmark seller and you’re looking at ambassador, definitely make that a goal of yours and it can unlock some of these benefits. And you’ll get a cool new badge. You can go to support.poshmark.com or Google Poshmark ambassador, and it gives you all of the requirements. We’ll put a link in the show notes. If you’re interested in seeing how to become a Poshmark ambassador. Poshmark, ambassador badges coming soon.
Doug:
Check it out. Don’t check out my empty closet. That’s one I’m on there just to learn about. I don’t know that I’m necessarily gonna do a ton of selling on there, but I think it’s going to wind up being mostly eBay and Mercari for me.
Liz:
Let me tell ya, since that bulk sharing and offers tool came out, my Poshmark is doing okay.
Doug:
Oh good. That’s good to know. Elite Poshmark seller.
Liz:
I know this eBayer it’s good. I’m creeping in on Poshmark.
Doug:
Lizzie on Poshmark.
Liz:
Oh dear.
Doug:
All right. What else? Liz?
Liz:
So, Doug?
Doug:
Yes?
Liz:
I have a question for you.
Doug:
Okay.
Liz:
Talk to me a little bit about what’s going on with Facebook transforming Instagram?
Doug:
Interesting. Okay.
Liz:
I have to say, please tell me about it. I want to see your take on this.
Doug:
So this came out last week. So Facebook is going to transform Instagram, which is very interesting. And Instagram’s already talking about it. The first article I read seemed a little editorialized and maybe even a little at first, I wasn’t sure it was real, but it’s real. Facebook wants to transform Instagram. They want to make it less of a photo sharing app. And Instagram has just said that they’re no longer a photo sharing app. So what they want to do is they want to make it more like TikTok, Liz. Oh! I’m doing my TikTok dance! (playing music)
Liz:
(laughing) Are those leggings in the background?
Doug:
Yes they are. Don’t look away, Liz! (both laughing) Anyway, you know I love TikTok. And so, what they’re trying to do is make Instagram more like TikTok. So they’ve really been trying to do this with reels. And at first it was a transition. But now if you go look at a reel, it looks like a TikTok. First of all, it’s one of those like, Instagram was launched as a photo sharing app and people like it for that. So I can see them trying to adapt a bit to bring over the short video crowd, the TikTok audience, things like that. I would say to a point. I don’t know if you want to take away what your platform was built on. It was built to be a photo sharing app. I like it because it’s a photo sharing app. I haven’t done much with reels. I’ve done a little bit on TikTok. I’m actually literally starting to do more. Because I want to do more into that because I really am a big fan of TikTok. I think it’s going to be big. I know I always make the dancing joke. It’s much more than that. It also kind of reminds me of the debate, like a couple of years back where everybody said that eBay was trying to be Amazon. And I was like, why don’t you just be what you are? And don’t try to be something you’re not. So it’s kind of that for me too. I don’t necessarily think their community is dictating them more towards videos. I don’t know what the, what the research says of reels versus, you know, TikToks and how many people are leaning into it. It kind of seems to me like they’re forcing it, but then again, I’m sure they’ve done the research or maybe that’s why they’re doing it? But obviously they’re trying to pull people from TikTok. TikTok is doing a lot with small businesses. TikTok is doing a lot with selling. Instagram is talking about adding a lot of selling features too, and kind of beefing that up. You know, frankly, we know that sellers aren’t super thrilled with Facebook marketplace right now and it’s definitely got some kinks to work out. So it’s kind of like, maybe they should focus on that instead of, you know, launching a new video platform. I’ve seen a little bit of negative sentiment so far. It’s like, people come there to share photos. They’re used to sharing photos there. I think stories was a big adjustment. I think reels has been a bigger adjustment. And when they say things like, “Well, reels get a lot more engagement.” That’s probably because Instagram wants you to post reels so they will show it to a lot more people. If I’m going to do short video, I’m probably going to do TikTok. They added a feature where you can share photos and put them to music and put them out. I just think TikTok is better at adjusting to the community and what the community wants than Instagram and Facebook are right now. I think Facebook and Instagram are saying, “Hey, community, here’s what we think you want.” And I hate that. It’s like a lot of platforms though, they do evolve to what the community’s dictating and that’s what TikTok has done. So TikTok during the lockdown saw that a lot of people started sharing, learning content on there. So they launched TikTok learning and put a lot of investment into that and that hashtag and that type of stuff. And they’re also seeing that there are a lot of sellers on there. There’s a lot of seller content on there. So they’re leaning into again, small businesses and selling on TikTok and making that experience a reality native to the platform.
Liz:
I’m not, I’m only on Facebook, Instagram and I know TikTok, right? I don’t get on TikTok a whole lot, because when I do the next thing, you know, I’m scrolling and I’m learning how to melt cheese upside down on a pan. And I don’t know some crazy stuff! But anyway.
Doug:
Don’t knock it, It’s very useful!
Doug:
I know it is! And that’s what happens! I get on TikTok and I’m like, “oh, that’s cool! That’s cool.” And then three hours later, I’m like, “Wow! I probably should have been sleeping!” But so Facebook, I use Facebook. I mean a lot of different reselling groups, but all for a reason. So that’s where I get the meat of my reselling knowledge and learning and a comradery. Instagram I follow a lot of different sellers and I follow sellers that share seller content, not necessarily as a business content to advertise their items. And that’s exactly what I do on my Instagram. It’s not a resell page that I am advertising to customers. However, I do keep in the back of my mind with every single post that a customer can find my Instagram. So I never liked to go and say anything bad about my customers. If I’m having a bad day or a rough, I just leave it off of there because anybody can Google it and find my Instagram. I loved Instagram for the picture sharing. Let me see a picture. Let me swipe, reels. So let me tell you, Doug, I don’t know if you remember this. When reels started getting hot. I hated them so much, I told Doug, I said, I am unfollowing every person that posts a reel. I hated them that much! And I did for like a month. I’m sorry if I unfollowed you, but I probably followed you back, but I hated reels that much.
Doug:
I wonder if it’s because when right after they launched, it was so embedded in your feed and people didn’t like it?
Liz:
And that could very well be it. Because I felt like all I was getting and I was like, am I on the right app? And there was nothing wrong with the videos. I just didn’t want to stop and watch videos. That’s what I liked about Instagram. And you know, TikTok’s got its place. And I think it was last episode you think about it, TikTok grew 87% during the pandemic.
Doug:
Yup.
Liz:
So this last year they grew 87%. All of this seller content, all of this educator content. If you don’t think Facebook and Instagram have not taken notice and want a piece of that pie, I think that’s exactly what they’re trying to do. You look at reels nowadays, half of them were created on TikTok and regurgitated to Instagram.
Doug:
Exactly.
Liz:
Now, I just want to clear the air because I feel bad for even saying that, but I’ll admit it. If you do reels, trust me. I watch you now. It’s grown on me. But I just really don’t want that to be all of my content.
Doug:
Well, I’m going to do a reel and test you and see if you unfollow me.
Liz:
It’s going to be a real quick unfollow, Doug. (laughing)
Doug:
I don’t know. I have three Instagram accounts and two TikTok accounts. So on Instagram, I’ve got my Snoop Dougie and that’s mostly seller stuff, supporting the seller community. Then I’ve got my music podcast and then I have my content company, my content stuff. And then over on TikTok I’ve got Snoop Dougie, which is kind of across the board stuff. And then I’ve got the one for the music podcast because I think it’s going to be useful over there. And I’m going to lean back into that. And then Facebook for me is kind of like, my main Facebook page is there’s some seller stuff and obviously I’ve participated in the List Perfectly Facebook group, but a lot of it’s like family and friends stuff on there for me now. And then I have, you know, some of the Albums That Saved Us podcast stuff on there too, because it gives you those group functions and potential live streaming and all that. Facebook really kind of tries to dictate what they think you need, and they really, the other big thing they do on Facebook and Instagram is they test stuff live. So they’ll push stuff out and they’ll see like A and B- it’s called “A and B” testing basically, because you’ve got two different groups that are seeing two different things. So potentially your Facebook could look different than mine or your Instagram could look different than mine. And they do the same on mobile too. And a lot of times they don’t super announce these features you just log in and you’ve got this new thing that you kind of have to figure out yourself. And it’s just, that’s kind of the Facebook culture is they test stuff live. Sometimes it works and sticks. Sometimes it doesn’t.
Liz:
Just, yeah. So Facebook marketplace is actually like ‘A to Z’ because I have friends that sell on marketplace and my marketplace profile looks nothing like theirs, my listing page. I don’t know. I think I lost count looking at other friends. I think I lost count at like five different listing flows. I don’t know. They come and go, I’ve gotten tags, I’ve lost tags. I’ve gotten features. I’ve had them taken away. And I think that that’s kind of the thing. Like somebody will be like, “Hey, I have a problem with this.” And I’m like, “oh no, it worked for me.” And then they’ll show me a screenshot of their listing flow. And I’m like, “yeah, that looks nothing like mine.”
Doug:
Exactly. Yeah. I mean, I haven’t listed anything on Facebook marketplace, but I’ve looked at the listing flow and, I don’t know, I’m not a super fan of it.
Liz:
It probably looks totally different than mine then.
Doug:
Yeah, probably. Then just all the different options you have to set up pages on Facebook. It’s pretty confusing.
Liz:
I don’t know. It might drive me to just stay on LinkedIn more.
Doug:
There you go. LinkedIn school. I do like LinkedIn. They seem to have it dialed in, but you know, again, I’m a fan of TikTok, obviously. I’m going to do more on there, but I’ve just kind of like seems to be, I kind of like how they’re running their business and how they’re doing things and again, how the community’s adjusted and they’ve adjusted to the community.
Liz:
So that’s all extremely interesting, Doug. I think we should have people sound off in the Facebook group and we’ll just start a thread with this article and ask people what they think!
Doug:
That’s true. (music playing) So TikTok versus Insta, which is it? What do you like on there? Let’s do a hashtag dance off! Liz, let’s do a dance-off!
Liz:
Hashtag hell no. (both laughing).
Doug:
Well we did our hashtag challenge. Maybe we got to do something else. We’ll think of something fun.
Liz:
I think that’s it for the news, Doug, we had a, so we found a seller question I should say.
Doug:
Nice, seller questions are always good. Well, what is it? Liz,
Liz:
Tell me what you think.
Doug:
All right.
Liz:
So, and this is very, very common. I see this all the time.
Doug:
Wait, wait. I’ll tell our listeners what I think. And then you can tell them really what they should do.
Liz:
And then I’ll correct you? (laughing)
Doug:
Yes.
Liz:
The seller question is, “I’m afraid that an item will sell when I’m out and about. I’m afraid it’s going to sell on another site before I get time to get to my computer and use the delist option. Talking about List Perfectly delist. What would you recommend? How do you handle it?”
Doug:
Well, first of all, selling’s a good thing. And it’s likely that this thing is going to sell when you are out and about, unless you sit at your computer 24/7, which some people do, but I don’t recommend it. You need to get some sleep. Even Liz sleeps. you So, a couple super high level things is like, yeah, hopefully you’re not just doing everything via your computer. Hopefully you have the mobile apps for the platforms or the mobile apps for obviously for List Perfectly the mobile experience. You want to get your notifications. You know, like I don’t sell as much as Liz does, but a lot of stuff runs through my phone. That’s where I usually find out I’ve gotten a sale and then I will get to my computer. So if I sell something on eBay, so I cross list using List Perfectly, of course, if I sell something on eBay, I need to make sure, because I’ve had a couple of times where stuff is sold at the same time and it’s like, “oh!” If I sell something on eBay, that’s already listed, let’s say it’s a Morrissey t-shirt even though I would never do it.
Liz:
You would never do it!
Doug:
But we’re being hypothetical. Let’s say I was crazy and selling a Morrissey t-shirt. So I sell it on eBay, but it’s still listed on Mercari. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to get the notice, and when I get a chance, I will run to my computer and I will go to List Perfectly, because that’s where I have my catalog. So the thinking there is that you have all your stuff listed in List Perfectly, and that’s kind of your inventory that you are listing, cross-listing to the different sites. And for me, it’s just the two right now. You know, Liz has a lot more, most, a lot of sellers will have a lot more. So then what I’ll do is I will delist it from Mercari and then I will mark it as sold. So I can track that as well. It’s easy to do from List Perfectly, and that’s the way to do it. And you know, it’s definitely recommended to list all your stuff within the catalog because you have that one spot. Because Liz, I used to do, I used to have a crazy spreadsheet that I would track with tabs for the platforms. So if I sold something, I’d have to go in and, you know, go into Mercari and delist it by hand from there and then go back to eBay and then go update my spreadsheet. But it’s very easy to lose track of stuff when you’re doing it that way. And then, you know, the list Perfectly catalog allows you to list and delist, mark stuff as sold, obviously cross-post bulk cross-post, but also it’s a great way to track your stuff. How was that answer, Liz? What’s the real answer?
Liz:
No, that’s awesome. And you know, like you said, make sure you have all the apps on your phone, especially, you know, Doug, you are eBay, Mercari, you know, something sells on eBay, you can just push the Mercari app, find it and delete it. You know, or wait until you get home or whatever. So I used to list everything on eBay. I didn’t use the List Perfectly catalog and that’s totally fine. Like not everybody does. So this was my little hack when I didn’t use the catalog is everything went in List Perfectly, I had my custom sku and I would put, if it was Poshmark, Mercari and Tradesy, I would put PMT. So I knew that it was cross-listed to those sites in that custom sku, in that custom skus comes up in your sold section. So, and then if it’s sold on Mercari, I knew that it was listed on eBay because everything’s listed on eBay. So, I go to eBay type in the item and I would see PT. So I, that told me that I would have to go to Poshmark and Tradesy to end it also. I figured this is just still kind of a crazy way to do it because it was taking me a lot of time having to type it in and go to the apps. So I downloaded everything into List Perfectly. And if you’re selling on, you know, four different platforms in your catalog, it’ll have eBay, Poshmark, Mercari, Tradesy. So this item sells on eBay. You cannot delist and relist. You can not mark sold from the mobile friendly version. But I do have List Perfectly saved on my home screen as a thumbnail, you can do that with any site. List Perfectly is mobile friendly. What’s really cool is all of my items are linked to the site. So if it sells on eBay, it’s gone. If you go and see Tradesy, all you have to do is click on that, and that’s actually a link directly to your item on Tradesy and you can push end. And then List Perfectly, push Mercari, delete. And then Poshmark. And you can end it there to that little blue link that tells you which platforms your items are listed on from your catalog is a direct link to that item. You don’t even have to open up a new app. You don’t have to search for it. You just push the button. So that’s kind of the, pro tip, if you will, on ending items on the go. It’s, that’s what I love about having the centralized catalog, or what I call, my List Perfectly catalog my seller hub. Honestly. So I didn’t invent that. I learned that from another user.
Doug:
And I learned that from Liz to manage my listings via my List Perfectly catalog.
Liz:
And that is our seller question for the week. Doug.
New Speaker:
Very exciting!
Outro
Doug:
All right, thanks for joining us this week on the seller community podcast from List Perfectly. Thanks, Liz for joining me. Episode 21 with our old friend, Dave Snyder. This week, we talked to Dave from List Rank Sell, and got some new insight on eBay SEO, eBay SEO myths, what’s up and coming, and some advice.
Liz:
It was a great interview. My brain is still in overdrive thinking of all the things eBay related and my listings and how I can improve them.
Doug:
We talked to Dave for a long time. I mean, there’s going to be a lot left. I don’t know… Maybe. What do you think? Should we do a couple of Dave episodes? Save some for the future?
Liz:
Yeah. So there’s your spoiler alert! Everything you just heard from Dave is not all we discussed.
Doug:
There could be another Dave episode in the very near future. You can find us at thesellercommunitypodcast.com/podcast. You can leave a message or ask a question and maybe we will also work it into a List Perfectly tip, or merely answer your question. You can actually ask questions across all the platforms. You can go to anchor.fm/sellercommunitypodcast and you can record a question for us that we can actually embed your voice into the podcast. You can email us at podcast@thesellercommunitypodcast.com. You can also post a question in the List Perfectly Facebook group using the hashtag seller community podcast so it’s easy for us to find, or you can mention Liz, Liz O’Kane or Doug, Doug Smith.
Liz:
You can listen to us anywhere you listen to podcasts. Be sure to subscribe and tell your friends. You can also follow us on Instagram. I am Coloradoreworn and Doug is Snoop.dougie and of course, follow @listperfectly. You can also find the List Perfectly Facebook group at facebook.com/groups/listperfectly.
Liz and Doug:
See you next week!
Doug:
See? That was good. Twenty-one episodes!
Liz:
We did it, Doug! Yes!
Doug:
All right.
Liz:
Now I gotta go fix all my eBay listings.
Doug:
Okay, good. Yeah, with all the new advice.