Listing Quality – Part 2: Getting Great at Listing Quality in eCommerce

In our second post in this series on getting great at listing quality, we focus on images, mobile and search rankings.

In short, the more product images you have, the better you perform. The visual aspects to purchase conversion are hard to underestimate, so it’s worth getting your images right. We recommend using at least 4-5 images per SKU to increase buyer confidence, and using more images has been proven by eBay research to increase your sales conversion rate by up to 7%. Volo’s listing software can host all your images for you, at no extra storage cost. In terms of direction on imagery, primary images should be on a white background, occupying about 80% of the space. Images should be of the product on offer and not include any accessories or other items not included in the box.

Optimising Images

With eBay we recommend that image sizes are at least 1600 pixels on the longest side to enable the free ‘zoom feature’ in search results. This helps your products stand out against your competitors. Although Amazon recommends a minimum of 1280 pixels on the longest image side, we’d advise you go larger for a higher level of detail. Amazon state that images should ‘ideally (our emphasis) be 2560 pixels or larger’. For Amazon in particular, images should not include any text, watermarks or logos.

Mobile is extremely important to Amazon and eBay. When browsing eBay items on your mobile, or using the eBay app, the full item description is hidden from view. Instead you see the images, title, variations and item specifics.  For this reason it’s extremely important to utilise item specifics on eBay, as they act as a short description. This allows customers to see the details they need and make a purchase, all without viewing the item description itself.

Volo’s creative services team produces web shop designs for eBay that are fully mobile-optimised. This gives the customer a rich user experience from browsing through to selection, drill-down and purchase. eBay’s listing allows more html in it than Amazon. Therefore by accommodating your branding and shop fronts, you can do more with your listings. If your eBay listings are not optimised for mobile, they won’t deliver the best possible experience for your customers.

By association, Amazon limits the amount of html, which has the effect of simplifying the listing format for that marketplace. Amazon is therefore already mobile optimised and naturally presents your listings in a clear way. It also means, obviously, that you can’t do as much with your listings as you can on eBay. For example, adding your own branding.

Marketplace Search Rankings

Next up is the all-important search rankings. The majority of online marketplaces – and this includes eBay and Amazon – use item-level sales history to rank products.  Put simply, if your item sells extremely well, these multi channel marketplaces deem it relevant to the users’ search. They have confidence in your ability as a business to deliver and so boost your item’s visibility in the search results.

It’s all about optimising your rankings, as you want to be ranked first and seen first every time if at all possible. With this in mind, you’re much better off combining related items into a variation listing. This is because each sale will increase your score on your variation listing, rather than diluting the score over multiple individual listings. Furthermore, customers now expect to see drop-downs and filters when searching for a product, so it delivers a better buying experience. You should factor this into the way you structure your listings.

Since search on eBay is largely based on its historical conversion rate, you might be better off wiping your history and starting again in cases where you aren’t ranking well. Be careful though, since the history at the top of an eBay listing page should not be confused with the conversion history used to determine its ranking (which is hidden). eBay’s relist functionality can preserve your conversion history while wiping the listing history.

Read about how Volo helped customers get great at Listing Quality here