We’re going to be launching our comprehensive guide to selling on eBay VERY soon — to be the FIRST to find out when we launch, head to AuctionTips.com and sign up!

Sellers who are willing to put in a little effort to learn the new rules are seeing better results. So you’ll likely come out ahead of your less savvy competition if you implement a few changes of your own.

So, where to begin? Let’s talk about the Best Match search criteria.

As of the beginning of March, the default for all item searches on eBay is now "Best Match" (it used to be "Time: Ending Soonest").

Buyers can change this default, but you can assume they most likely won’t do that, so it’s important to know what makes an item a Best Match.

eBay explains these search criteria:

• It sorts the listings based on Time Ending, Relevance, Seller Performance, and Shipping & Handling.
• "Relevance" is based, in part, on past successful buyer behavior for similar items (eBay notes what items are clicked on most by buyers when they run searches, and this means heading keywords will be extra important).
• Sellers with buyer dissatisfaction rates greater than 5% in the last 30 days will see their listings appear lower in search results.
• Sellers with the lowest Detailed Seller Ratings for Shipping & Handling Charges will also see a decrease in exposure.
• Sellers with Detailed Seller Ratings of 4.6 and above within the last 30 days will get higher ranking in search results.
• The time remaining on an auction is still taken into consideration, but it isn’t the main criterion any longer.

This can obviously have a huge impact on your sales. In fact, sellers with a DSR or 4.6% or greater will now likely have up to 20% more exposure on their auction listings than their competitors.

Just check out this screen grab of a search for webkinz (they’re popular on eBay right now) to see what we’re talking about.

We took this from page 6 of the search results…

Some sellers here only have a minute or two left, yet they’re lumped in with the 2-hour auctions way back on page 6 where no one is going to find them.

We clicked on the profile for one of the poor-ranking sellers. This is a high-volume seller with a 99.1% positive feedback rating, but his average DSR is 4.4. Not so bad, you might think…

… But compare the page 6 seller to a seller who ranked at the top of the same eBay Best Match search, whose average DSRs and Negative feedback results are slightly higher…

Obviously a few fractions of a percentage point make a huge difference here! A difference, in fact, of being ranked at the top of the search… or back on page 6.

And it doesn’t stop there. Shipping costs are now a really big deal on eBay as well — and that doesn’t just include buyer feedback on your turnaround time. Best Match will soon also take into consideration how the shipping cost for an item compares to other items in the same sub-category, and also whether the shipping price is specified.

Items with shipping costs significantly above the average cost for other items in the same sub-category may receive less exposure from now on.

So this is the Best Match default search in action.

What can you do to make sure you’re not shoved way out on page 6 with just minutes to spare on your auction?

Don’t panic! Our Advanced eBay Mentoring Team gave us some fantastic strategies you can use to propel your listings to the top of those searches. And since this is new territory for everyone, you can use this change as a great opportunity to get the jump on your competition.

Keywords are, as always, key

The keywords you use in your item listings are going to be more important from now on, so you need to make sure you’re getting them right.

The good news is that you don’t have to be psychic to figure out what keywords your buyers are searching for. Just do your own search for items you’re thinking of selling and pay careful attention to the listings that are making it to the top.

For example, when we go back to the search, we found that "unused tags, new, webkinz, and rare" seemed to come up in all the top featured listings. Those are the keywords you would start with in this case.

Do your own searches to make sure you’re getting your keywords correct, and include those words in your auction listings.

Test, test, test!

Here’s a very handy tip… you can test how effective your keywords are!

Post your item, then make a note of where it ranks. Go in and change your heading… eBay will rank it again within just 5 minutes. Check to see if this improved your listing or not, and revise your heading again if you need to.

You can do this as many times as you like up until the last 12 hours of the auction.

Shipping secrets

Shipping is always going to be a bit of a tricky area to address… especially when you have to rely on your postal system to make sure your items are delivered in a timely fashion. There isn’t much you can do about delays beyond your control, but you do need to remember that communication is the name of the game when it comes to shipping your goods.

Here are some top tips you can use to make sure your customer knows when to expect your items so they’re not up in arms because their package is a few days late:

1. When you make a sale, leave positive feedback for your customer that also states your shipping times. You can say "Thanks for buying my product! You can expect to receive your item on April 17th," so the buyer has an exact date they can aim for. The more detailed information you can give them, the more likely you are to receive positive feedback yourself.
2. Be careful when you calculate your shipping times… add a day or two to your estimates to avoid disappointment. Then if it arrives earlier, you’re golden!
3. Include details of your shipping costs on a sheet of paper in the package so the customer sees it when their package arrives. This way you can explain that, for example, although postage may only have cost $1.50, you charged $3.00 because you needed to buy bubble wrap ($0.75) and a post pack ($0.75) to make sure the item was delivered in good shape.
   

   Again, this gives your customer all the information they need to see you’re being reasonable with your charges. You can even print these details on a bright pink sheet of paper if you think it will help attract their attention!

4. Ask for positive feedback from your customer! You can include a written note with your item, add it to the feedback you give to the buyer, or send a follow up email to them, but make sure you politely request that they give you positive feedback, or at least let you know what you can improve on if they’re not happy.
5. Remember that your DSR is based on the last 30 days only, so you can work to improve it all the time!
6. Add a specific shipping service and price in the Shipping Details section of your listing, and making sure shipping costs are competitive with what buyers see in other auctions. And put your shipping information in the body of your item description too so there’s less chance people will ignore it.
7. Check out eBay’s Shipping Best Practices for more info… http://pages.ebay.com/sellercentral/shipping.html#best

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Here’s a rundown.

Lower insertion fees for auction and fixed price listings (including Store Inventory Format listings).

This answers years of complaints from eBay sellers — who have been defecting to Amazon.com, which doesn’t charge listing fees.

Of course that means that there will be changes to Final Value fees. And reserve fees will no longer be refundable if the item sells.

Visit eBay’s Basic Fees page to see the changes.

Fixed Price Format items can no longer be listed for under $1.00.

This could have an impact on people selling info products like e-Books, and it undermines one of our favorite strategies for amassing a lot of feedback in a short time.

Gallery is free!

Well, duh. Listings with Gallery photos outsell listings without them by a big margin. An eBay Australia study found that items with pictures had a 17% higher sell-through rate, received 73% more bids, and achieved a final sale price 189% higher than those without. That’s good for sellers and GREAT for eBay. So what took them so long?

Tiered pricing for Featured Plus so more sellers will be able to have their items show up in the Featured box on the main page.

Several of the changes involve Detailed Seller Ratings, which now help determine how prominently a seller’s listings appear and what payment options they offer. Until now, only overall feedback counted. Detailed Seller Ratings ask for feedback on four specific areas of a transaction:

• item description
• communication
• shipping time
• shipping & handling charges

New standards for PowerSellers. As of July, it’s possible to lose PowerSeller status if a 4.5 Detailed Seller Rating score isn’t maintained. On the other hand, PowerSellers who meet the new criteria will be rewarded with discounts of 5 – 15% off their final value fees, unlimited PayPal protection, and greater exposure in the search listings.

Best Match becomes the default method for sorting searches. Since it started testing Best Match, eBay has found that it converts best of all the sort methods.

Best Match gets the DSR treatment too! Detailed Seller Ratings will be factored into the search algorithm, so once again, sellers with bad DSRs go down to the bottom of the listings. Sellers with 4.6 or higher DSR scores within the last 30 days will get increased exposure. Those with 4.2 or lower scores for shipping and handling over the last 30 days, or more than 5% buyer dissatisfaction in the last 30 days will get decreased exposure.

Sellers can no longer leave negative or neutral feedback for buyers.This one could get a lot of negative feedback from sellers! While there are checks and balances in place to make it fairer for sellers, any seller can tell horror stories of unscrupulous buyers or total newbies leaving undeserved bad feedback. Until now, retaliation has been the most effective way of getting down to an agreement.

Repeat customers now count toward a seller’s overall Feedback Score.Now sellers will be rewarded for offering the kinds of products and services that make people keep coming back to buy from them. There’s a time limit of one feedback comment per week. Feedback scores will also now consist of a rolling 12-month percentage instead of a lifetime score.

Want details? Visit www2.ebay.com/aw/core/200801.shtml#2008-01-29054823.

You might also want to take part in the Seller Webinar this Friday, February 1 at 10:00 AM Pacific Time. You can sign up here.

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