Want to drive your Ebay sales? Optimize your item specifics.

Sellers who wish to boost conversion rates and increase their listings’ exposure on Ebay and beyond, should keep their listings’ item specifics optimized, which means filling as may as possible with the values that are as clear as possible. In short  - want to drive your Ebay sales? Optimize your item specifics.

Ebay continuously changes its product categories requirements. Sometimes, the way in which categories are organized is changed, or new categories are added, and sometimes the change is applied only to sub-categories. In any case, whenever Ebay changes its categories, there is also a change in the item specifics of the category. 

Item specifics provide shoppers information about the product they are viewing. They include the product’s most important attributes and characteristics, such as brand, size, color, type etc., depending on the product category. When a seller fails to include item specific in his Ebay listings, the products are most likely to appear way down in the search results. As some of the specifics are mandatory, failure to add them may cause the whole listing to be rejected.

Because item specifics are so important, it is important to keep up with Ebay’s new requirements updates, who will usually let sellers know by notifying them in the dashboard. Some of the changes may make perfect sense, while others may seem completely unnecessary and burdensome. No matter the case, you must comply with the changes. Insisting on ignoring mandatory changes to item specifics requirements will only lead to your listing disappearing from search results.


Moreover, external search engines also look at the item specifics, so a failure to keep them updated may cause them to drop in third party engines as well. If you have any issues with the new requirements, the best course of action is first implementing the changes, and then contacting Ebay for feedback. In recent years, Ebay has taken big strides towards opening up to their sellers’ opinions, and it might just work!

In any case, whether you like them or not, whenever Ebay notifies you of “Soon to be Required Item Specifics”, it is best to apply the changes as soon as possible. Why? First of all, these changes will become mandatory soon, meaning if we do not apply them, our listings will be rejected by Ebay. Second, if Ebay has decided that these changes are mandatory, it is probably for a good reason. It means tha making the changes to our listing will probably help their performances. We always want to do something that will help our listings, so why waste time?

However, for sellers with hundreds of products, and specifically those who do it manually and not use any outside tools, it may be quite a daunting task to apply the changes to all their products. For these sellers, it is recommended to begin with the products that produce the most profit, or the most expensive products, and work their way down. 

After making all the soon to be required changes to the item specifics, we then turn to Ebay’s recommended changes. These are broader changes, and it is worth reviewing them, because they might provide good insight. Like some of the required changes, some of the recommended changes may seem odd. But keep in mind that Ebay probably has a good reason for recommending them, since Ebay bases its recommendation on the behavior of actual users. So if Ebay recommends it - that means people look for it.
 

For example, if a seller sells a product that is navy blue, it is recommended to simply tag it as “blue” in the item specifics, since this is how Ebay indexes the product and it will be easier to find. However, since “Navy Blue” is a phrase users search for specifically, it is recommended to add it to the product title or the product description. 

A more specific example is nail polish. Some nail polish brands have their own brand colors. For sellers who sell such nail polish, it is recommended to tag the products in the item specifics according to their basic color, and add the unique color name in the title. For instance, Pretty in Pink nail polish should be tagged as “pink” in the specifics, but have the name Pretty in Pink in the title, since users search for this specific name. 

Sellers who wish to boost conversion rates and increase their listings’ exposure on Ebay and beyond, should keep their listings’ item specifics nicely filled and very clear. In short  - want to drive your Ebay sales? Optimize your item specifics. Item specifics optimization can be a very tedious task and this is where Lisuto can help. Lisuto combines technology with deep ecommerce consumer product knowledge helping sellers optimize their product data and extract much more out of the online store. Using proprietary AI technology, Lisuto goes through the existing product information, tagging the data with Ebay required item specifics navigational tags, making necessary corrections and completions, bringing the quality of the sellers' product feed up to highest standard in terms of uniformity and completeness, making it perfectly optimized for Ebay’s Cassini and for the user's eyes.