eBay Best Practices - 3 Tips For Ranking Your Items Higher In eBay Searches

How To Rank Higher In eBay Searches

Want to rank your items higher in eBay searches? Today we're going to be discussing 3 eBay best practices which will give your seller account and your items a boost in eBay search.

We have all heard the term SEO. It refers to search engine optimization. Basically knowing what search engines are looking for to rank items high and then meeting those requirements in an effort to get your website, article, blog, etc to rank higher in searches.

Though many of us don't think of eBay as a search engine, eBay most definately is a search engine. eBay and Amazon are two of the largest search engines in the world. Only thing is they don't search the web, they just search products on their website. That said the same way SEO applies to websites, there's SEO involved in putting together an eBay listing and getting it to rise to the top of eBays page one in searches. But how do you do this?

In this post were going to discuss 3 tips for getting your items ranked higher in eBay searches. Now first off your seller rank and feedback plays a very important role. That's not something your going to be able to build or change overnight, but the sooner you get started the sooner your rankings will improve. There are some things you can put into action today which will give your items a boost in search. Here they are.

1. Offer Free Shipping

Whenever possible offer FREE shipping on your eBay listings. eBay outright tells us they give a boost in search to sellers who offer free shipping. Buyers also like free shipping because A. it's free, but B. it's easier seeing free shippign or even a flat rate shipping as opposed to making a buyer enter their zipcode in the listing to find out what an item will cost in shipping.

Just roll the shipping cost into the item cost. If you would normally sell a phone charger for $10 with $2 shipping, just make the price $12 and offer free shipping. Your still getting the same amount of money and your going to get a boost in search.

The only time I would recommend against doing this is on larger, heavier, bulkier items. Reason being it may cost $50 to ship an item to California from where you live but only $10 to ship it a state over to say Wisconsin. With an item which has a much higher shipping if you go towards the higher end more local buyers are way overpaying for shipping and if you go on the lower or medium end of shipping prices without a doubt you will wind up getting a buyer from the other end of the country and the shipping fee you charged will not cover shipping, you will be comming out of your own pocket.

Aside from especially large, heavy and bulky items I would always recommend offering FREE SHIPPING.

2. Accept 14 Day Returns With A 20% Restocking Fee

I know many sellers don't like accepting returns. I'm with you, it's a hassle and it costs you money. That said in order to be eligible to be a top ranked and power seller you need to accept returns.

One strategy I use to meet this requirement, rank my items higher while still discouraging returns is to accept returns for the minimum amount of time 14 days, while also charging a 20% restocking fee. Now if an item arrives broken or not as described you cannot charge that fee, however if it's just a case of buyers remorse or the person doesn't want the item, they can return it, but will be charged a 20% restocking fee. This greatly discourages returns. At the end of the day you may want to waive that 20% restocking fee to avoid upset buyers and bad feedback, however it does act as a deterrent from people buying items on a whim and returning for no reason.

3. Use Terapeak

This is kind of hard to wrap up in a bullet point, I've made entire presentations and webinars on Terapeak and what an important tool it is to eBay sellers. Terapeak can help you with every aspect of your eBay business from finding you hot selling items with the hot selling or category research tools. It can help you analyze products your thinking about selling prior to buying inventory, and it can even help you source the inventory from Alibaba.

What I find most valuable about Terapeak from the persepctive of ranking your eBay items higher is the SEO and Product Research tools. The SEO tool will allow you to search a product or keyword and find out how much is sold in a given week, the sell through ranking. You can see the top 20 sellers ie your competitors. You can also find out what keywords buyers of your product are searching for and not only that but in the order of importance. You can then use those keywords in your listings title and description, putting an emphasis on putting the most important keywords to the front of the title. This gives a huge boost in eBay SEO or optimizing your eBay listing.

For those of you who aren't aware of Terapeak or who havn't tried it out you can get a FREE 7 day trial to test it out for yourself.