Six Ways to Maximize Your Visibility

The most important factor in being able to make sales on eBay is the visibility of your eBay items in search results. Most eBay bidders and buyers find the items upon which they bid simply by searching eBay. If your items are getting lost in a sea of search results—or worse, if they aren’t even turning up when people search for them—then you’re losing out on potential sales.

Here are six basic tips to help ensure that your eBay auctions show up in and don’t get lost in the incredible avalanche of search results that most eBay members get as they try to buy.

• If you have multiple items, list them separately. It’s true that eBay provides multiple item listing formats that can be tempting because they appear to let you sell lots of items from a single listing, thereby saving you time and trouble. The problem is that if you list 200 items in one listing, and your competitor lists one item in each of 200 listings, your competitor will appear in search results 200 times more than you. Multiple item listings are fine at times, but if you fewer than ten items to sell, it is often more helpful to list each of them separately, to ensure that your listings come up often in search results.
  
  
• Be sure to include a photo and use the gallery option. It is always essential to include a photo if you want to get the maximum number of bids that your item deserves. Don’t forget, however, that the photo is important in search results, too—and that for comparatively little money, you can add the gallery option, a seller feature that will cause a photo of your item to appear in search results.
  
  
• List items longer. Unless you’re in a hurry, there’s rarely ever an advantage to listing an item for less than seven days, and under most circumstances, listing for ten days is better still. The longer your item appears in search results, the more time bidders will have to find it and add it to their watch lists.
  
  
• Be sure to include the correct spelling. If you aren’t sure about the way something is spelled, look it up! Use Google or a dictionary or just to and get the box or look at the exterior of your item to make sure that you’re able to include its correct spelling in your listing. This seems like such an obvious point that it wouldn’t need saying, but some of the best deals to be had on eBay as a buyer continue to be the ones in which you find and bid on an item that has been misspelled—and that nobody else has found or bid on as a result.
  
  
• Be sure to include alternate spellings if there’s room. In addition to the correct spelling, it can be very helpful to include common misspellings, slang terms, and related phrases in your item listing or auction title. This will allow your item to appear in search results for buyers or bidders that don’t know how to spell or that think in approximations. For example, use the title “New 40GB Hard Drive 40 GB Disk Disc” instead of just “40GB Hard Drive.” This will allow your auction to appear when a user searches for “hard drive” but also when a user searches for “40 gig disk” and for “40gb hard disc.”
  
  
• Cross-promote your items. If you have multiple items up for sale, don't just use the same dull listing over and over again without letting users know that you've got other inventory on offer. In every listing, include a prominent line asking users to check out your other item listings. If you want, include a link to the list of your current item listings—to get it, find the link labeled "View seller's other items" at the upper right of any of your item listing pages.

If you have other suggestions on how to increase visibility for your fellow eBay sellers, visit the About eBay discussion forum and let us know what they are!