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I am driving myself nuts over this. I sell a lot of t shirts but lately my sales have been horrible. In an effort to investigate some of my slower moving stuff i looked up the search ranking on struggleville and was shocked to see the results. I have a Bob Marley & the Wailers T Shirt. When i put in the search term “bob marley shirt” my item does not show up at all in ebays search. When i put in “bob marley AND the wailers” it still doesn’t show up since i have an “&” in my title. Finally when i put in my exact term my item pulls up 3000 out of 4000. What the hell? No wonder it has never sold, it’s never been seen. I’m finding this issue a lot lately. There may only be a few other identical shirts like mine but since the keywords get lumped together its often hard to rank. But ebay is working against me if it doesn’t even pull up my item at all if i don’t have the exact term i searched for in my title the exact way. I’m beyond frustrated and i really dont know how to correct this issue other than to completely change my title to be fake as hell so i put the exact thing people are searching regardless if it makes my title make sense. And I’m a power seller so it’s not like im some newbie who has nothing to get favor by. It’s more of an algorithm issue.
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I don’t know anything about struggleville, but I just searched on ebay for “bob marley wailers shirt” and there are only 588 matches. So your rank can’t possibly be 3000 out of 4000. Have you tried to find your shirt by just searching on ebay, maybe after logging out of your seller account? That way you can see exactly how far down your item shows up.
Re: “&” vs “and” – I did a search with both, and it looks like what works best is to put “and” in your title instead of &. My search with “&” brought up items with both “&” and “and”, and my search with “and” brought up only items with “and.”
I find ebay’s keyword weirdnesses like this a little annoying, mostly b/c I don’t think to check them when I’m listing b/c it seems like they should just do “the right thing”, only to later find out the opposite. For example, I didn’t use to put the word “Womens” in the title of my women’s clothing listings b/c I was listing them in the “Women’s Clothing” category, so I assumed that ebay would automatically treat these listings as if they had the “womens” keyword. Big mistake. And there’s no documentation on this anywhere either, as far as I could tell. But incomplete documentation is nothing unique to ebay, and evntually I figured things out.
Re: checking if your listing is getting viewed, just go to the Performance section of Seller Hub, and then to listing impressions. Below the graphs you’ll see a list of every single listed item with it’s traffic stats. By looking at “impressions” you can see how many times your listing comes up in a search results page that someone actually looked at.
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It is best to avoid punctuation marks in titles, including apostrophes.
One aspect of search rank is click-thru vs impressions. If your ad has high impressions but low click-thru then search rank is lowered. An example is “Levi style jeans” that might come up when someone searches for Levis. They want Levis, and wont click-thru to your ad.
Here is ebay’s suggestions on titles. It is good to print this out and refine titles accordingly.
http://pages.ebay.com/help/sell/title_desc_ov.htmlI wonder if there is a software tool out there that analyzes all of our ads’ titles and points out problems. That would be very helpful.
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Thanks for the link, PP.
I got a couple good points from another TRS. She said to start searching eBay for the item and then look at what comes up in the dropdown. Like when you are searching for Bob Marley and the Wailers, per OP, put in Bob Marley and then look at the suggestions eBay gives you. Use the topmost search term for your listing, then add descriptives to reach your full character allotment.
The other point she made (and I’ve seen this discussed elsewhere on this forum) is that the first 3-5 words fall into Cassini search. So, back to the OP, Bob Marley & The Wailers takes up all five words, but has no descriptive items that would trigger for a buyer. It could be referring to a CD, poster, hat, shirt, etc. Change to Bob Marley T-shirt Wailers and you may have much more views!
Well, that’s her advice anyway. I’ve been working on this principle lately and my sales have improved. I’ve been listing more consistently, so that counts too, but I’ve noticed that where I’ve edited old listings to the new format per above, those items are selling, where they’ve been sitting for the past year. Could be coincidence, but I’m sticking with the format for now.
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