There is supreme irony in both the timing and the nature of the changes to Google’s product search submission procedure and how it will impact some eBay sellers in the 4th quarter, irony which will not be appreciated by current eBay sellers.
Read here for The Whine Seller’s take on the eBay announcement.
The changes to Google’s feed policy together with eBay’s Top Seller Program, introduction of Best March II and general ineptitude when implementing change will bring total disruption to sellers of unique, vintage and collectible items in the high selling season. Is it the creative disruption so beloved of the Dear Leader or simply more destructive disruption? Time will tell, but remember, it is your business and you need to analyze what this change means to your bottom line, profit or loss.
Some real info on what this change means for sellers? It is the ultimate Amazonization and not necessarily a bad thing except for sellers who are dealing with eBay and the new eBay customer mindset.
For those who list auctions there is no change, other than that imposed by Best Match II which at this point in time (it will change) seems to default almost entirely to ending soonest. You are contending with eBay’s finding process, not Google which has not crawled auctions in some years.
In the Fixed Price marketplace
A very large number of listings will be rejected by Google.
Commodity sellers listing multiple quantity fixed price items will have less problems than the already beleaguered collectibles seller because the commodity buyer needs less in the way of description, he already knows what he is buying. Expectations are set and with minimal care will be met.
Antique and vintage collectibles sellers are now really between a rock, Google, and a hard place, eBay.
eBay may believe “the vast majority of traffic to eBay listings comes from searches on eBay” but one can’t help wondering how much of that traffic is bewildered buyers wandering around trying to find IT.
Sellers should be seriously concerned by that thought because in Best March II item ranking is influenced by ‘relevance’ which includes ‘impressions’. You do not want lots of impressions which do not result in sales, this will drop your item in search because in eBay’s mind there was something unsatisfactory about the listing (or it would have sold). Bolding is mine.
“Relevance helps determine your listing’s position in Best Match. Your fixed price listings will appear in search results based on the listing’s recent sales in relation to the number of impressions it received. An impression is any time a buyer sees a search results page that includes your listing.“
The browser or potential buyer who selects 200 items to view at a time can do serious damage to your impression ratio. Whether they see your listing at the bottom of the page or not makes no difference to eBay. The goal would appear to be to have the buyer type in search words and arrive directly at the item they buy each time, if that doesn’t happen, penalize the sellers who did not make the sale.
Here are some options and caveats :
1. Become Google compliant
Edit listings and titles to remove any reference to shipping, your Terms of Service, everything which does not directly describe your item from the item description area. Use normal capitalization and punctuation, do not use all caps. No exclamation points, wiggles, asterisks in the title, think Amazon.
On eBay we put our Terms of Service in the listing for a reason, so that we can point and say “It is all right there!” when things go pear shaped. The big question is, does it help? Does eBay listen? That is something only you can answer.
For what it is worth you might put your TOS on your About Me page and include a link, or use a link to an off eBay page, just make sure you have nothing (no links) that could possibly be construed as an offer to sell off eBay by eBay. It is a risk because most CSRs don’t understand the rules they are enforcing.
2. Do your item traits
Item traits are now more important than keywords for Google, (although both are important) the condition trait is required. Yes, any idiot knows Vintage means used but do it anyway.
- Use keywords in title,
- use different keywords in description, do not ’stuff’, keywords must be relevant.
- Pay attention to the content of the first 155 characters and spaces, this is all the hook you will get apart from your picture. Don’t waste it.
- Use Google traits.
- Try to match the eBay category to the Google taxonomy where possible.
3. Take a long hard look at your business model.
- Is your eBay store still working for you?
- What are your monthly expenses and income?
- Is the return on investment for your fixed overhead worth the amount of sales and the sheer stress of remaining on the venue?
The days of stashing your stagnant stock cheaply on eBay are long gone. As of this month a return to Auction listings only, perhaps with BIN (do the math) for unique, vintage, collectibles and antiques may be best practice.
An alternate fixed price venue may be the best display shelf for stock that has not sold after a couple of auction cycles; especially if you have paid attention to the SEO tips above.
Is John Donahoe miffed?
This is the ultimate creative disruption and it did not originate from his cubicle.
Y’all come back!
Full disclosure: I am an ex-eBay seller currently selling on my own website and Bonanzle.com
Hi Henrietta,
I’m really going to have to buy into Dear Leader’s take on this one, as for some time now my stats have only shown 8-12% of my eBay traffic coming from Google. They seem to change their game more often than eBay itself (which is hard to imagine!), and in some months over the past 18 months or so I’ve seen that number as low as 5-6% with my own website topping Google on the referrals chart.
Now my vintage niches are especially keyword rich, so while I’m in compliance with most of your recommendations naturally, I do realize that I may benefit more in my eBay categories than some other vintage categories do. As you know over the past couple of years I’ve tried out several of the other venues, but the buyers in my categories still seem to only know of eBay.
I used to run approximately 80-100 auctions per week, but the past 3 months or so I have transitioned almost entirely to Fixed Price/Store listings. I’ve found that the old bidding wars of the past have died away as eBay shoppers have gotten much more savvy and that I’m much more likely to sell an item for $15-$20+ with Fixed Price/Best Offer in a few days than I am to get a $9.99 bid on the same item over a 7-day period. In the past year I have had items pass at $9.99 auctions which have soon sold for as much as $75 Fixed Price, sometimes within a week or two of the auction ending! The recent changes have me willing to try a round or two of auctions again, but I’ve reached the point where with the “good stuff” I feel much more confident about realizing my own perceived value by pricing it at a level I feel it deserves and waiting for one likewise minded buyer than I do starting it low and crossing my fingers that a few bidders see what I see in that same item.
While any idiot may realize that vintage is used, this is one area that really bugs me about Google because I really don’t believe vintage deserves to be labeled either new or used (or refurbed for that matter). It’s likely too small of a slice to rank it’s own rating any time soon, but I really do in some ways resent having to tarnish my listing of a pristine 100-year old collectible with the “used” label as I feel it brings connotations of “crap” to an otherwise beautiful item.
Thanks, as always,
Cliff
Posted by Cliff Aliperti on October 9th, 2009.
I agree with Cliff on his points in the last two paragraphs here. Those who sell and write about vintage, used and antique items are often thrown into inappropriate categories on eBay and elsewhere.
Even on the Examiner, where I write about auctions and antiques I’m lumped in the “Home and Living” category.
To sum it up, “we don’t get no respect”. Which is why I think we’ve taken to banding together in many ways here on the Net. It’s good to have places like Red Ink Diary, to exchange ideas.
AW
Posted by AuctionWally on October 9th, 2009.
For the most I agree with Cliff. we sell in ebay store only there.
Insofar as being in the vintage/antiques category, it presents it’s own special problem. I don’t use ebay.com,, I use ebay.ca… but I’m assuming it’s same on both.
on our listings form, there is NO OPTION for USED at all.
So my items show up on ebay google results as NEW.
No biggie, but it’s rather bothersome.
Here’s a pict of what MY form looks like when listing a collectable antique carpenter’s plane. I’ll just add my tweet in here.
#ebay listing form for vintage, collectables does NOT have a USED condition attribute-are they thinking over there? http://twitpic.com/ku51j
Dunno if this will cause problems with google, a buyer, or ebay, and I’ve given up much caring if it does.
I’m at the point where I list what I list, the way I want, to hell with the venue, and in most cases, google too. Way too many games played. Thankfully my biz does not rely on any ONE channel for sales.
The game of “gaming the venues” has probably sucked unknown millions of hours of seller’s time and effort during the past few years. There should be a survey on that.
insofar as stats on google-fed visits to ebay items… that’s a puzzler.
Of course it will be low if ebay doesn’t do their job.
It will be low if your items aren’t optimized for gooogle.
It’ll be low if Google is playing games with ebay feeds.
It’ll be low if there are lots of competitors on your same product line…
it’ll be low…
aww. I’m not playing that game anymore :-)
Posted by vince jelenic on October 9th, 2009.
Arguable I already had my say but lord knows I never run out of things to say. :-)
I have always viewed Google traffic as more of a nice extra than a necessity. The majority of my sales come from my own marketing from my own website or, like Cliff said, from eBay itself. Also, as we mostly do auctions, Google never did us much good anyway because they focus on fixed price. So I’m not really worried about whether or not this is up and running by the holidays.
That said, it bothers the heck out of me that this is an issue that is really important for some people and that some people really do rely on that Google traffic and eBay not only took so long to say anything about it, when they finally did say something it was useless and vague. I really don’t know if I can safely delete my Google Accounts or not. Should I be trying to keep submitting the listings myself? Can I trust eBay to submit them in the future? Exactly when will they start to submit them?
Those are some pretty basic questions that they really owed us an answer to with that update and they just didn’t do it.
I just think that a lot of people are ticked off at eBay and that a little extra effort in communication would go a long way. I don’t understand why they aren’t making that effort.
Thanks for the post, Henrietta!
Posted by Hillary on October 9th, 2009.
@Hillary
I would advise you to not delete your Google account, a Google a/c is not just for feeds.
Your feed for eBay listed product will have been closed off by Google. If you were doing automated feeds and it is still showing in your dashboard, either delete or pause it. If you were uploading manually one feed at a time you don’t need to do anything.
Google Base is no longer accepting feeds for shopping, it is for real estate, vehicles, services etc only. Base accounts have been moved to Google Merchant Center, same log in.
Posted by Henrietta on October 9th, 2009.
Regardless of how the ebay/google drama turns out… I think Henrietta had a huge announcement here.
“The goal would appear to be to have the buyer type in search words and arrive directly at the item they buy each time, if that doesn’t happen, penalize the sellers who did not make the sale.”
Brilliantlly put!
Beyond everything else ebay does, this is the one tactic that WILL shoot both their feet off eventually.
If you are the seller whose item didn’t sell….. it only spirals downwards from there, since ebay takes steps to ensure you DON”T get the exposure needed anymore to MAKE the sale next time.
This is not growth, or even stasis, it’s cave-dwelling.
(But has eBay checked to see what bear is in the cave before entering ?)
Posted by vince jelenic on October 9th, 2009.
Henrietta,
Google Merchant Center is still accepting individual feeds for eBay items. I manually loaded one today - and found that I had duplicated most of the items, which were showing up from an eBay feed, which they hadn’t been last week.
I have read that Google Merchant Center will stop accepting individual feeds for aggregator/marketplace items as of Dec 1, 2009. I cannot confirm that.
Posted by nadine on October 10th, 2009.
I thought about this a bit more…. sorry
Timing, what great timing, DEC for final google changes… October eBay… everthing in “disruption”, starting now..
Maybe there’s a golden egg here — in the midst of this turmoil this year, any venue you’re on that continues to SELL for you — well that’s a venue you should stick to, like dried cement on construction boots!
I mean… if ANY venue can still provide you with profit after this debacle, it’s a keeper come January, doncha think?
the real test might be to sit back, leave your listings as they are now, and see what happens. (add more, of course for christmas).
Results of that might tell you something :-)
this whole “disruption” stage proves a simple point.
Venues USED to control their destinies. That is no longer the case, not even for eBay. Yet they manage to control yours.
Time for a serious rethinking here to going SOLO first, and joining venues as ‘guests” I would think.
cheers.
Posted by vince jelenic on October 11th, 2009.
@ Nadine
Yes, the new Google Merchant Center will allow you to upload your feeds. Mine had been uploading daily from Bonanzle but being rejected. I believe my feeds were rejected because Bonanzle had their aggregated feeds up and running. I canceled my feed after writing this blog.
My question on the eBay feeds would be:-
Are the feeds being processed? Are you getting an error message? Is everything normal?
Answers might give us information as to how Google & eBay are handling this, i.e. what progress if any has been made to date on implementation.
Bonanzle swung into action fast. They know that the sooner the transition is accomplished the less disruption to traffic in peak high selling season. Better to take a traffic hit early in October than in November or December.
Posted by Henrietta on October 11th, 2009.