Comments on: eBay Tips 2008: Review Your Titles

By: Andy Toogood

Andy Toogood — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 22:16:51 +0000

Thanks for all your comments. Interesting that like us no-one has a particular view one way or the other.

We have tried both and it didn’t seem to make any difference either way so maybe we’ll try mixing it up a bit and see what happens.

We do capitalise SALE, NEW, BNWT, etc and that does seem to work well but maybe ‘CROCS WELLIES size 11 blue’ or something similar would work! (if only Crocs allowed sales on ebay in the first place!) )

By: Sue Bailey

Sue Bailey — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 22:11:29 +0000

Well, doing back to how is it for me – yes, of course you skip more in the mixed caps than the all caps. If it’s all caps, you have to read it all – if it’s mixed, you read the words in caps first. That’s the point: if you have a page full of all-caps titles, your eye doesn’t pick out anything, whereas if it has certain words highlighted in caps, it *will* read them.

I don’t think you can judge the result from one line: you need to read a whole stack of listings altogether to really get the effect.

By: Josordoni

Josordoni — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 18:50:44 +0000

I wrote three up in u/c and got fed up changing the caps lock, so the rest are going back to caps…

Sorry Sue!

By: northumbrian

northumbrian — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 18:05:59 +0000

I think the capital works well most times, but I have been listing in lowercase for so bloody long ,I drive myself nuts meaning to hit caps lock and forgetting

By: Josordoni

Josordoni — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 16:18:03 +0000

What I might try is to use caps for the salient words, and leave the descriptives in u/l. So for example I have:

GOUDA POTTERY HOLLAND PZH WINDMILL CLOG 1946

That would make it:

GOUDA Pottery Holland PZH Windmill CLOG 1946

Now somehow I skip more words in the 2nd than in the first one… Sue? How is it for you?

By: Sue Bailey

Sue Bailey — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 15:36:53 +0000

Whereas I think it makes for horrible readability even with gallery pix. There’s not necessarily an über-right answer to everything

By: Dan Wilson

Dan Wilson — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 15:01:32 +0000

Lynne,

I think it looks alright in your Shop when the titles are in caps… when there is a gallery pic. When a run if items that don’t have gallery, I find it a little dense.

Dan

By: Josordoni

Josordoni — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 14:49:24 +0000

But I like “impactful”…..

it has a lot of …mmmmm….. impact!

but seriously, folks, I have always used caps for titles and headlines. I have always found them easier to read than u/l for headlines, whilst I hate all caps for anything longer than a dozen words.

But now after Sue’s comment about unreadability in the shop, I am wondering… I shall have to experiment with caps mixed with u/l…

By: Dan Wilson

Dan Wilson — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 00:47:59 +0000

Correction: “…capitalising only some of your title can have greater impact.”

Thanks Sue, the woman who tought me: “embiggen”.

By: Sue Bailey

Sue Bailey — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 23:27:40 +0000

capitalising only some of your title can be more impactful

This is correct, though I’d question whether “impactful” is actually a word

Capitalised *can* help your titles stand out in search results, but it can also make them unreadable, and if you have a Shop full of all-capitals titles, it really *is* completely unreadable. Use capitals sparingly. “….. SALE!” certainly works