• Welcome from Brian McGregor
• 1. Thought for the Day
• 2. Best Match - Now the Dust Has Settled
• 3. Fancy Running Your Own Auction Site?
• 4. Mobile Phone Video on Your eBay Auction?
• 5. A Gift From Me to You
• 6. News & Views:
  Mutual Withdrawal Withdrawal??
  Another No-Cost Tool
  Understanding eBay
  Great Ormond Street Hospital Has Wings
  Here's An Infuriating Game
• 7. Someone's Auctioning What???
• Back to Newsletter Archive
  

Do your friends, family and colleagues a favour, and share this eBay Auction Newsletter with them. Why not email them a copy NOW?

Or tell them to grab their own copy free from:
http://www.auctioninnercircle.com

Jim Rohn

You will know that Best Match is now the default sequence that listings appear in when returned from a search.

In the US, sellers have been trying to second guess how Best Match works, with a view to giving their listings a boost in the search return listings.

The back story is that Raghav Gupta, an eBay developer, published a tool called BayEstimate. This was a very useful tool which would assign a relevancy score to each word in your listing title. This enabled you to omit less relevant words and add in suggested highly relevant keywords. When first released, it used data that was about a year old but was then enabled to use live data from the eBay site.

Sellers began to experiment and found that including a single keyword multiple times could push their listing to the top of Best Match results.

eBay reacted by requesting that the Research Labs take down the BayEstimate tool which they have done. No doubt eBay will now build into Best Match a way of lowering the relevance of repeated keywords.

So, what can sellers do about getting their listings returned higher in searches?

Reading eBay’s patent application for Best Match reveals the following tips to maximise exposure for your listings:

1. Make sure your titles are filled with relevant keywords and use all the available characters.

2. If Item Specifics are available for your item use them. Best Match should take these into account even if they’re not in your item title.

3. Use eBay Pulse to establish the most searched for words in the category you’re listing in

4. If you have an eBay Shop/Store use Traffic Reports (Finding Methods > Search keywords) to establish the most searched for terms for your own eBay Shop. (This is especially powerful as it reveals the search engine used, whether this be eBay or an external site such as Google)

5. Include pictures in all listings, and use the Gallery listing upgrade

6. Keep your postage at (or below) average for the category you’re listing in

7. Do a search for your product using Best Match, look at the titles that are at the top and check if they have keywords that your title is missing. Learn from the listings that are already highly ranked.

There are of course other contributing factors to Best Match such as feedback DSRs (Detailed Seller Ratings), the length of time left to run on the listing, geographic proximity to the buyer, the number of bids already made and whether the listing has Buy It Now available.

The final factors taken into account on Best Match is feedback Negative and Neutrals, and any Item Not Received Disputes registered against your account.

Sellers of long tail products will have an advantage simply because there is less competition when a buyer searches eBay. If you’re selling common products you have to compete with multiple sellers but selling rare items may result in your listing being the only one, or one of very few, matching a buyers search terms. Even for common products it’s often possible to list them using less common keywords. I recommend duplicate listings, one with a standard title and multiple duplicates (possibly even low cost Shop listings) with much more specific keywords in the titles.

Whilst the wizards search for ways to "massage" the treatment of their listings by Best Match, the simplest way to ensure your listings are highly ranked is to concentrate on making your listings highly relevant to buyers.

Ever thought what you would have if you started your own online auction site and managed to attract 0.001% of eBay's throughput? That's a ten "thousandth" o" eBay's business.

If you made your auction site's fees the same as eBay, you would earn about $22,000 in fee income.

Not bad, and maybe a whole lot of fun!

Here are some sources of auction site software. The price ranges from zero to several hundred dollars...

http://www.auction-script.com/index.php?page=products

http://www.mewsoft.com/Products/Auctionawy/Features.html

http://www.softbizscripts.com/auctions-script-features.php?s=aw

http://www.radscripts.com/auctionsoftware/ebay_style/

http://www.usanetcreations.com/auctionstandard.html

http://www.phpauction-gpl-2.51.auctioncode.com/purchase.php

Can you set up your own auction site? Can it be done?

Well, Darren Bock did it. He set up his own online auction site a year ago, http://www.wensy.com/, and now he has 3,000 registered users and about 30,000 listings currently running.

Having said that, Darren isn't making any money from his auction sites as it's free to list and to buy. You can see in this interview why he has set it up like that:
http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abu/y208/m09/abu0222/s02

It's generally accepted that on some types of items, video can really enhance the auction page.

The big advantage of video is that you can show moving pictures; even if the thing you’re selling doesn’t move itself, an all-round view can show it off better than a dozen pictures.

However, not every seller has a camcorder or other type of video device, or indeed the video expertise, with which to create their video.

Why not make a short video of your item for sale using the in-built facility on most mobile phones? There's no need to spend time and money on anything, just pick up your mobile phone and off you go.

All you need to remember is to try and make it interesting. If you're confident enough you can record yourself talking about your item too. After all, you know your item best of all, and you can also show your prospective buyer that you are a real (normal? genuine? handsome? beautiful?) person!

So, you've made a video of your item with your mobile phone, and you've got the video onto your PC, what next?

Well, the easiest route is probably to get a no cost account with http://www.vzaar.com.

Simply upload your mobile phone video to vzaar, and follow their very clear instructions on how to incorporate your video in your auction page.

Try it yourself. You'll find it's easy to do and, hopefully, will produce a higher sales price!

Mutual Withdrawal Withdrawal??

eBay Germany has re-introduced mutual feedback withdrawal in limited circumstances. Sellers can request buyers retract neutral or negative feedback within 30 days of the feedback being left.

There are limits of two requests per month, and sellers can only make one request per transaction. Once a request has been made a buyer has 7 days to respond, if they refuse, fail to respond within 7 days, or simply ignore the request then the feedback will remain on the sellers profile.

This is currently available only on eBay Germany and is running as a pilot so details may be tweaked in the future. Mutual feedback withdrawal should however roll out across all eBay sites in a similar format by October.

I'm sure eBay.com and eBay.co.uk dropped this capability some time ago, so it looks like we might be getting it back!


Another No-Cost Tool

As you will know, misspelling tools can be used effectively to find those bargains on eBay.

Here's the latest such tool on the block. It's worth a dabble...

http://www.typobuddy.com/

Understanding eBay

You may recall I sent out a quick email to you last Saturday about some key changes shortly due to take place on UK eBay in relation to Buy it Now and Shops.

ChannelAdvisor are hosting a webinar in conjunction with eBay aimed at helping eBayers understand these changes. The webinar will take place on the 22nd September at 1pm (BST) and will be hosted by Rafael Orta, Head of Seller Experience for eBay UK and Max Leisten, Senior Product Manager at ChannelAdvisor.

As well as detailing the changes, this will be a good opportunity to ask any questions you might have about them.

You can sign up for the webinar here:
http://www.channeladvisor.co.uk/webinars/701000000000mdp.html

Great Ormond Street Hospital Has Wings

Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children in London is running a charity auction on eBay.co.uk.

They have persuaded a load of celebrities to personalise sets of angel's wings, and these are up for auction now.

Celebrities who've helped include Leona Lewis, James Cracknell, Tess & Vernon Kay, HRH Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie plus the casts of EastEnders, Coronation Street and Holby City.

If you want to check it out, there is a special introductory page here:
http://www.ebay.co.uk/disneyfairies/

You'll need to hurry, the auction ends on Thursday, September 18th at 8.00am.

Here's An Infuriating Game

Try this horrible little game. I think you'll like it.

It moves a wee bit quickly for an old man like me, but I got to level 6!

http://www.onemorelevel.com/game/orbox_b

Nothing surprises me when it comes to internet auctions. Amuse yourself with some of these beauties in our regular trawl through eBay's auctions.

Here are some auctions I've spotted as I trawled eBay recently:-

Guess who'll be back?

Do you think it's a coincidence that the seller lives in Limerick?

If you've a profound question, here's your chance

And yet another one from Ireland....

I sincerely hope you can't make use of this!

Disclaimer - I have no association with any of the sellers of the above items.