Your winter coat may not have made an appearance lately, but it’s time to start perfecting your marketplace listings…

With nearly two thirds of buyers preferring to shop using online marketplaces and internet spending reaching a whopping £74.3bn, it’s clear the world is hooked by online spending.

And when it comes to popular holiday seasons, online shoppers want their purchase journey to be as quick and easy as possible when they have a lot of buying to do.

So it’s time to start thinking about your product inventory and fully optimising your marketplace listings by ensuring they’re up-to-date and accurate across all marketplaces.

Listing items seems pretty easy, but when you have more than one marketplace you need to craft product titles for, beautiful imagery that needs to meet each site’s specifications, as well as adding the product details, things can get messy quickly. Listing quality is core to your business success and its potential for growth, so we’ve developed some best practices that will help you enhance the quality of your listings:

1. Help your customers find what they’re looking for
   Different marketplaces have different character length requirements for listing titles, so use the full length available and put the key descriptor words at the beginning of the title. To identify relevant keywords use Google’s Keyword tool or Terapeak to find the most searched term in relation to your item. You can also use Terapeak or a similar tool like ION Toolbox to automate checking your listing quality. Furthermore, at Christmas customers want to find the product they’re looking for without trawling through endless listings, so always select product categories and sub-categories that best match your item.

2. Organise your data for product standout
   Chances are you’re replicating the inventory information provided by your suppliers, which is less than perfect. Employ a process to optimise this data to ensure it’s accurate, consistent and stands out against competitors selling the same or similar products. Duplicate information can be damaging to your business. Google factors marketplace behaviour and traffic into its search algorithm, so using identical information on all marketplaces can hurt your web traffic.

3. Increase sale conversions with great visuals
   Don’t underestimate the importance of pictures on listing performance – the more high quality images you have, the better your sales conversions. It’s best to use about four or five images for each SKU to increase buyer confidence, plus using more images has been proven to increase sale conversion rates by up to 7% (according to eBay). For major marketplaces like eBay, image sizes should be at least 1600 pixels to enable its free zoom feature in search results to help give your product standout. When it comes to Amazon, 2560 pixels or larger is advised, and imagery should be text, watermark and logo-free.

4. Make your listings look good on all devices
   eBay states that over 50% of sales across its platform now touch mobile at some point. It has also launched apps for iPhone, iPad, Android, Blackberry and Windows phones in eight languages – and together these clocked up over $28bn sales in 2014. When presented with these numbers, it’s hard to ignore the importance of mobile optimisation. Different marketplaces display different information on mobiles and apps, so familiarise yourself with the mobile experience of each of your marketplaces. For example, when browsing eBay on mobile, the full item description is hidden and instead images, title and item specifics are pushed to the forefront – so focus on these elements of your marketplace listings.

5. Boost your item’s visibility in a crowded market
   The majority of marketplaces use item-level sales history to rank products, so if one of your items sells extremely well marketplaces identify it as relevant to users’ search – pushing it up the search results list to boost its visibility. Why not optimise your rankings further by combining related items into a variation listing? Each site increases your score on your variation listing, rather than diluting the scores over multiple individual listings. Today, customers expect a better buying experience, so incorporate drop downs and filters to better structure your marketplace listings. Take note that search on eBay is ranked on historical conversion rates, so use its relist function to preserve your conversion history.

At Volo, we want to help your business take off by helping you improve the quality of your marketplace listings across all channels. Start your ecommerce adventure today.

Your winter coat may not have made an appearance lately, but it’s time to start perfecting your marketplace listings…

With nearly two thirds of buyers preferring to shop using online marketplaces and internet spending reaching a whopping £74.3bn, it’s clear the world is hooked by online spending.

And when it comes to popular holiday seasons, online shoppers want their purchase journey to be as quick and easy as possible when they have a lot of buying to do.

So it’s time to start thinking about your product inventory and fully optimizing your marketplace listings by ensuring they’re up-to-date and accurate across all marketplaces.

Listing items seems pretty easy, but when you have more than one marketplace you need to craft product titles for, beautiful imagery that needs to meet each site’s specifications, as well as adding the product details, things can get messy quickly. Listing quality is core to your business success and its potential for growth, so we’ve developed some best practices that will help you enhance the quality of your listings:

1. Help your customers find what they’re looking for
   Different marketplaces have different character length requirements for listing titles, so use the full length available and put the key descriptor words at the beginning of the title. To identify relevant keywords use Google’s Keyword tool or Terapeak to find the most searched term in relation to your item. You can also use Terapeak or a similar tool like ION Toolbox to automate checking your listing quality. Furthermore, at Christmas customers want to find the product they’re looking for without trawling through endless listings, so always select product categories and sub-categories that best match your item.

2. Organize your data for product standout
   Chances are you’re replicating the inventory information provided by your suppliers, which is less than perfect. Employ a process to optimize this data to ensure it’s accurate, consistent and stands out against competitors selling the same or similar products. Duplicate information can be damaging to your business. Google factors marketplace behavior and traffic into its search algorithm, so using identical information on all marketplaces can hurt your web traffic.

3. Increase sale conversions with great visuals
   Don’t underestimate the importance of pictures on listing performance – the more high quality images you have, the better your sales conversions. It’s best to use about four or five images for each SKU to increase buyer confidence, plus using more images has been proven to increase sale conversion rates by up to 7% (according to eBay). For major marketplaces like eBay, image sizes should be at least 1600 pixels to enable its free zoom feature in search results to help give your product standout. When it comes to Amazon, 2560 pixels or larger is advised, and imagery should be text, watermark and logo-free.

4. Make your listings look good on all devices
   eBay states that over 50% of sales across its platform now touch mobile at some point. It has also launched apps for iPhone, iPad, Android, Blackberry and Windows phones in eight languages – and together these clocked up over $28bn sales in 2014. When presented with these numbers, it’s hard to ignore the importance of mobile optimization. Different marketplaces display different information on mobiles and apps, so familiarize yourself with the mobile experience of each of your marketplaces. For example, when browsing eBay on mobile, the full item description is hidden and instead images, title and item specifics are pushed to the forefront – so focus on these elements of your marketplace listings.

5. Boost your item’s visibility in a crowded market
   The majority of marketplaces use item-level sales history to rank products, so if one of your items sells extremely well marketplaces identify it as relevant to users’ search – pushing it up the search results list to boost its visibility. Why not optimize your rankings further by combining related items into a variation listing? Each site increases your score on your variation listing, rather than diluting the scores over multiple individual listings. Today, customers expect a better buying experience, so incorporate drop downs and filters to better structure your marketplace listings. Take note that search on eBay is ranked on historical conversion rates, so use its relist function to preserve your conversion history.

At Volo, we want to help your business take off by helping you improve the quality of your marketplace listings across all channels. Start your ecommerce adventure today.