Most eBay sellers are desperately looking for ways to Increase sales, I know this because that is where we began in 2008.
After the agonizing first few years on eBay, we finally made a breakthrough and found a scientifically proven method to constantly increase our sales by increasing our eBay conversion rate!
In 2012 and 2015, Max and I received eBay awards for having the highest eBay conversion rates.
CrazyLister co-founders with an eBay award for outstanding eBay conversion rate
In this post, I will take you through a step by step tutorial so you can apply the same method to increase your eBay conversion rate (and sales).
Listing design affects sales (and increases eBay conversion rate)
While conducting a research on eBay conversion rate optimization, we got exposed to numerous studies that showed a direct relation between focus on design and increase in sales.
I have previously mentioned one such study that was conducted by The Design Council –
In 2005, a group called The Design Council studied 63 publicly traded companies over the course of a decade.
They discovered that companies that focused on design did substantially better than the ones that didn’t – they outperformed the average performance by 200%.
You can clearly see that stock prices for design focused companies (Red) are significantly higher than the average performance of the top 100 businesses (blue).
companies focused on design outperform the market
Look at Apple, one of the best examples of a company focused around design –
Apple’s share of the smartphone industry’s profits is 92%, while iPhones account for less than 20% of the smartphones sold worldwide!
Mind blowing, right?!
Understanding that human decision making is strongly affected by design, we decided to test just by how much we could increase our eBay conversion rate with design.
Realizing eBay listing is a process
Our first try was to create what we believed to be beautiful eBay listings for the car GPS devices we were selling.
Having no solutions like CrazyLister at the time, I had to spend countless hours on Youtube videos, learning how to use Photoshop to create static but good looking listings.
When we finally launched the listings on eBay, we quickly realized that what we believed to be a “perfect listing” had tons of room for improvement –
- Customers from Australia were asking us if the GPS came with a Map of Australia, although we had a textual list of all the included maps.
- We were constantly asked about warranty, although we mentioned we offered a 2 years warranty
- We were getting tons of questions about map updates
And so on…
Since these pieces of information appeared to be critical for potential customers, I began revising the design to try and make them more apparent on the listings.
I added visual elements (instead of plain text) to put focus on these critical pieces of info –
visual elements for ebay listing to increase ebay conversion rate
And then the magic began – the amount of questions decreased while sales grew (this was one of our main eBay hacks).
We realized that launching an eBay listing and forgetting about it is simply leaving money on the table.
From that moment on, eBay listings design became an ongoing process of constant improvement and optimization, rather than a one-time task. The goal was to turn more visitors into customers (thus increasing the eBay conversion rate).
Over the course of the next 6 months, we managed to increase our eBay conversion rate and sales by 220% by constantly optimizing our listings, which led us to win the eBay awards.
A Step by step scientific method to increase eBay conversion rate and sales
1. Check your baseline eBay conversion rate
- Enable eBay’s seller hub, Go to – https://signin.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?SignIn&UsingSSL=1&siteid=0&co_partnerId=2&pageType=2323012&ru=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ebay.com%2Fsh%2Fovw
- Go to Performance -> Traffic
- Set the dates of the reports to show last 3 months
- Scroll down and look at your sales conversion rate
This is your baseline – the number you want to constantly increase, your eBay conversion rate. It’s basically the number of sales divided by the number of visitors to your listings.
It’s also one of the most important parameters for ranking high on eBay’s search results. This is because eBay earns a fee for every transaction, meaning it’s in their best interest to promote listings that convert better.
2. Come up with test ideas
This is where art and science mix. Collect any possible input to generate ideas to improve your design.
Here are some sources you can use:
- Go through your eBay messages – check for the most common questions, is there any info you can make clearer?
- Go through your feedback – what are your strong points? Make your listing scream these out!
- Show your listings to friends and family and ask for constructive feedback (learn to accept it!)
- Check your competitors feedback – what reasons do their customers have to choose them? Where can you offer more value?
- Get test ideas from this blog, from our tests and from case studies of successful eBay sellers
Start with the ideas you suspect to have the biggest effect on your sales.
3. Apply the test on your listings
Ok, so now you have a list of ideas and you’re ready to test your assumptions.
- Create a template to test your assumption
Let’s assume that you’d like to test the effect of adding a personal touch to your listings.
Using CrazyLister, you can easily add an image of yourself or your staff and a short paragraph about your business, thus earning trust points, which are critical for conversion and sales.
Tip: Save the template with a name that will indicate when you applied it and what you tested, i.e. “Adding trust elements – 2.9.2017”
- Apply the template on your live eBay listings
CrazyLister allows you to automatically apply a template on multiple eBay listings with one-click. Here is a tutorial showing you how this works.
* If you use a 3rd party listing solution like Sellbrite, ChannelAdvisor, SaleFreaks etc. you have the ability to apply a CrazyLister template on your existing eBay listings right from within your listing solution.
4. Wait patiently for at least a week!
At this stage – you’ve applied your test assumption (adding a personal touch) to your live eBay listings.
Now you want to see the effect it will have on your conversion rates.
In order to eliminate sudden spikes, weekend effects, holidays and so on – Don’t measure your conversion on a daily basis!
Instead – WAIT! For at least one week to minimize side effects, and only then look at your conversion rate for the past week.
5. Measure your new conversion rate
Just like in step 1:
- Go to your eBay seller hub
- Set the dates to show last week (note that eBay’s data has a lag, so you’ll need to wait about 3-4 days more to see last weeks performance)
- Check your conversion rate
6. Take action according to the results
If the test resulted in an increase to your eBay conversion rate – keep the change and continue to the next change.
If the test resulted in a decrease to your eBay conversion rate – remove the change and continue to the next change.
Understand that as long as you see ANY changes to your conversion rate – the test was a success!
Sometimes it will seem completely counter intuitive – you’ve just added a personal touch you expected to add trust, but your conversion rate actually goes down. These things will happen.
The important thing is to leave feelings and ego aside and ONLY listen to the numbers.
As long as you’ve tried and LEARNED something new – the test was a success!
It’s impossible to only implement tests that will constantly increase your conversion, be patient and treat this as a process.
By methodically testing more and more assumptions – you are statistically 100% guaranteed to increase sales over time.
7. Never stop testing
Unless your eBay conversion rate is 100% – in which case, please leave a comment below this post, I want to work for you ;), you should never stop testing!
There is always something you can improve.
By utilizing CrazyLister’s bulk template apply feature, you can easily make changes to ALL of your live listings with one click, and constantly improve your conversion rate and sales.
