We first reported this glitch back on the 12th November and on the 16th all indications showed that the problem had been rectified. Now once again there’s a high probability that although they’re looking for your product, desperate to spend their money and buy from you in the run up to Christmas, buyers just won’t see the item that you’re selling. If buyers do happen to select the Time Ending Soonest search view your items will magically reappear, chances are that they won’t and in Best Match they’ll just think eBay’s selection and availability is rubbish.

The image sent in by TameBay reader Jon shows a search for an A3 Epson Printer with 66 search results found, but eBay are only showing us 5 results comprising just 7 items. That means that 89% of matching search result items are hidden from buyers.

I’m a bit lost for words on what to say, so I’ll leave you to express your thoughts in commments.

Hunch recognises that one size doesn’t fit all and that when you’re looking for a recommendation you’re much more likely to find a product you like from someone that knows you well. Also people that know you well might recommend a product that you didn’t even know existed. Hunch aims to do the same based on the questions you answer and by linking other social networks to your Hunch account. Hunch then uses what it calls a “Taste Graph” to make predictions about the things that you like.

I’m liking the sound of this a lot. I’m fed up with eBay’s Daily Deals – They’re mostly a load of high street goods which I have little interest in most of the time. I’m fed up with eBay’s email marketing – they’re also run of the mill products I’ve little interest in.

If Hunch can be integrated into eBay then at last eBay might be able to draw on their heritage and get back to the site everyone loves because of the kooky niche products you would bid on or buy if only you knew that they existed. This does of course rely on eBay getting around to integrating Hunch into the site – not something they ever managed to do with the last great recommendation service they purchased – Stumbleupon. This time eBay need to get it right and integrate the technology and embed it into every aspect of buying behaviour and communication.

Most of the products I’ve bought lately on recommendation have been personal recommendations, not automated mass email marketing. I’d have never purchased items like the Acer Revo (which I love and you should have one of), if it hadn’t been recommended to my be a colleague. I’d have never known it existed and that’s what eBay should be doing for me. eBay should be helping me discover the unusual, the unique and most important of all the products I just can’t live without but didn’t know existed.

Of course that’s just extracurricular email marketing… here’s a thought, what would it do to eBay’s Best Match if everyone’s search results started to be individualised based upon what eBay knows about you, what you’ve purchased in the past and what people who know you or have similar tastes to you would like? What if Best Match became smart enough to find a Pogo Polaroid mobile phone printer for me and a…. well I don’t know what eBay might find for you and just possibly it’s something you don’t even know you want or need, but if eBay get Hunch right when you see it you’ll be buying it instantly.

I noticed today that I had started getting sales above the level of the last couple of weeks, so I went looking in search to see what was going on. Products are appearing on the first page of search results that previously had been missing – not surprisingly once items were visible they started to sell again. eBay have identified and fixed some of the issues (they are always monitoring the site performance) and the good news is things are getting put right just in time for Christmas sales – traditionally as soon as people receive their pay check at the end of November sales go through the roof.

How have your sales performed over the last few days? Have you seen an uplift in the last couple of days? eBay never share the secret sauce behind Best Match (partly to stop sellers gaming the system but also I think because they tweak it so often that what they told you today would be out of date tomorrow), but have you seen any change in sales patterns this week, particularly in categories that are catalogued and are displayed as Product Cards in search results leading to Product Pages?

I had thought one of the major problems might be how highly catalogue product cards were ranked in search results. I was concerned that my listings were being demoted in search results. I might have been wrong on both these counts as it appears that buyers simply might not be able to find my listings no matter how hard they try.

16 search matches but only 1 displayed to buyers

Today I did a search for a “17″ monitor”. I clicked to view just items from “Desktop PCs & Monitors” and then scrolled down to select the exact category “Monitors”. I then selected the brand I was interested in – IBM – from the sidebar product finder.

eBay happily tells me that there are 16 matching listings to my search (that’s good, 3 of them are mine!), but eBay only display a single listing! (You can click the screenshot to see the full page image)

Why is this? Why do eBay have 16 listings but are only showing one to buyers? Why are eBay not displaying my listings and the other 15 listings available to buy?

There’s a simple answer, eBay search is broken. I don’t know why, but for whatever reason the Item Specifics selected aren’t returning the products requested in search results.

To demonstrate that this is a problem with eBay Best Match I did one last thing. I changed the sort order from Best match to Time Ending Soonest and magically the missing listings appear. How many buyers will do this though and instead simply think eBay doesn’t have the inventory they want to buy?

The image to the right shows two screen shots side by side for the same search term, on the left is the search under Best Match and the only difference to the right hand side is that the sort order has been changed to Time Ending Soonest.

I returned to Best Match and the search which should show my monitors but doesn’t and tested one last thing. I added the word “IBM” to make the search string “17″ Monitor IBM” and that miraculously helps Best Match find the monitors I’m selling, along with those from the other sellers. I shouldn’t have to do this though – I’ve already selected “IBM” from the Item Specifics.

There are some further complications in that eBay separate “IBM” and “Lenovo” as two different Item Specifics, (essentially the same brand with a name change). However that’s not the root cause of the problem as I’ve used both options on different listings.

The problem is that on the initial search eBay say that there are 16 matching items in search results but only choose to show me one. Buyers aren’t as persistent as me, they’ll get fed up and go away to buy somewhere else.

16/11/11 Updated to add: eBay appear to have fixed this glitch.

There’s a long thread on the eBay Business Seller Board and there are many more discussions about the matter. A TameBay reader even pointed out that when they searched for my own auction listings on eBay they too were dumped at the bottom of search results.

TameBay reader Robin has been doing some investigation and tested where his auctions appear in search and used two different eBay accounts to do some a-b testing. He’s captured his findings in video which makes for interesting watching and if you currently sell on eBay you need to be aware of this information.

eBay auctions (even in Best Match) are supposed to be sorted by Time Ending Soonest, the only sellers listings dumped to the bottom of search results should be those who are below standard. Why are good sellers listings being demoted? There’s been much discussion of this and some sellers have had answers from eBay support suggesting that their listings are being demoted due to their sell through rates. If you don’t have a high proportion of auctions closing with multiple bids there’s a pretty good chance that your auctions will be hidden from potential buyers regardless of your seller standards.

If your auctions are being demoted in search by eBay it’s not just your slow selling items that will be demoted though, it’s every eBay auction that you have running on the site.

The best advice we can currently offer if your listings are being lowered in search results is to cancel all of your auctions. Relist your products on fixed price listings and trust to eBay Best Match to enable buyers to find them. Start relisting auctions at low prices to encourage multiple bidders – eBay like auctions with lots of bidding activity. Try to avoid listing auctions which will end without sales – we know that this has been a valid selling strategy in the past but it will no longer ensure visibility but is now likely to lead to your auctions being blacklisted and demoted to the bottom of search results.

The most striking feature of catalogued items is that auctions are not being sorted by “Time Ending Soonest”, even if that’s what you’d normally expect. In many categories such as Televisions, or Computer Monitors half of the first page of search results are Catalogued listings. I’ve just been re-checking live listings and currently I’ve found a catalogued auction with just 24 minutes left to run on page 7 of search results. In the past all auctions about to end would have risen to the top of page 1 of search results!

Click to see more search results

So what appears to be happening here is that your fixed price listings are no longer sorted by Best Match and your auctions are no longer sorted by Time Ending Soonest. Your listings are sorted according to the eBay catalogue entry sort order.

Previously if you had a fixed price listing attracting a large number of sales then in eBay’s eyes it would have a high “popularity” sales score and would appear at the top of Best Match search results. Now it appears that your high performing listing may be being dragged down in search results by other sellers under performing listings. It’s the order that the catalogue products are presented, not how well your individual listing sells that counts. Worse still your auctions about to end are also being dragged down in search results and may never even reach page 1.

In some Tech and Electronics categories this might not matter – for instance if you’re searching for a White, 64GB, Wifi and 3G iPad 2, then (apart from eBay insisting on showing you Black ones) there are only a couple of options to choose from (SIM free, Vodafone etc). This means your listing will be found by interested buyers.

In other Tech and Electronics categories it’s much more disturbing for sellers. A buyer looking for a new LED TV or a Flat Screen Computer Monitor is probably not being as specific as in the case of an iPad. They may not mind which brand or model TV they purchase, but be more interested in particular features. In this case catalogue’d listings which hide bargains about to end on the 7th page of search results aren’t a great solution. Not displaying the most popular listings at the top of search results but instead amalgamating popular listings with overpriced under performing listings into a single catalogue entry dumped way down in search results isn’t a great buying and selling experience.

Currently there is no information apart from empirical data as to how search is sorted. If you can figure out what the sort criteria is for Catalogue Listings we’d love to hear from you. If you can’t figure out how they’re being ordered just bear in mind that the auctions you’re paying for may never make the first page of search results so you’re not likely to get great sale prices.

The one thing we can tell you that eBay haven’t, is that your auctions in catalogue categories are not being sorted by Time Ending Soonest regardless of what you thought your insertion fees were paying for.

eBay search now defaults to Best Match, which blends auctions in Time Ending Soonest with Fixed Price items sorted according to relevance. The criteria that is most important for relevance is recent sales – the more an item sells the higher it will appear in eBay search.

You can change your eBay shop settings to sort your products by Best Match and this will ensure that your best selling lines are featured highest in your eBay shop. This works for both the home page view, for eBay shop categories and for eBay shop searches.

In the run up to Christmas (yes I know it’s early, but Christmas isn’t that far away) it’s worth changing your default shop setting to sort by Best Match as this will ensure visitors to your eBay shop will be presented with your fastest selling most popular items first.

As an added bonus it’s a quick and simple way to see which of your products are performing best, and which could do with some extra promotion with Best Offers or MarkDownManager or possibly just lowering the price or offering a shipping promotion. If an item is at the bottom of your eBay shop when sorted by Best Match you know that item isn’t selling well compared to other products you stock on eBay.

TameBay reader Dario spotted the anomaly and if you check the seller’s feedback or the “Seller Information” section of their eBay listings they’re clearly not a Top Rated Seller and eBay aren’t displaying the TRS badge on their listings.

However if you’re looking for their items in search results the search result page is still promoting them as Top Rated. Any buyer looking for items this particular seller supplies will still see the Top Rated Seller badge displayed in search results alongside their listings. What we don’t know is if the products are still receiving the TRS boost in Best Match search results.

Have you ever seen this before? How many sellers have lost Top Rated Seller status but still have their products promoted as TRS in eBay search results? Are eBay gifting certain sellers search preference even if they have lost TRS status?

I’m sure that there are plenty of conspiracy theorists out there who will believe that eBay are showing bias based on the sellers feedback, but from past experience with eBay it’s much more likely to simply be a bug in their software.

What do you think? Are eBay showing unfair favouritism to certain sellers, or is the site so unwieldy it’s just not working as it should?

In a way this makes sense – fixed price listings are not sorted by Time Ending Soonest, but by Best Match. Those listings at the top of search results may have up to 30 days left to run, and if they are Good Til Cancelled listings may run indefinitely.

eBay say that the change is to simplify the search experience and to enable buyers to identify which items are auctions from those available to purchase immediately.

Should it make a difference to purchases whether or not the time left is displayed for fixed price items? The chances are if they’re not sold they’ll be relisted anyway but some sellers believe it gives an additional incentive to buyers if they think they’ll lose the item if they don’t purchase immediately. However unless the buyer choose to sort listings by time ending soonest they’re probably not seeing fixed price listings about to end in any case.

What do you think about the change? Do you believe it will affect buying behaviour or will it not make any difference to sell through rates?

Many thanks to TameBay reader Joe for the heads up on this site change.

One of the interesting features of a Multi-Variation listing is how the price is displayed in eBay search results. In Best Match this often appears to be a random price selection and not usually the lowest or highest priced variation.

As an example I used the search term “Duvet” and one particular listing was shown in search results with a price of £17.97. Hovering over the “More Options” link displays a different price of “From £7.95″ which is the lowest price variation available for that particular listing.

Using a slightly more specific search term of “Double Duvet” includes the same listing in search results, but this time the price is displayed as £13.97. That’s a 22% reduction in the price I’m being shown, so what causes the difference in pricing and how does eBay choose which price to show?

What appears to happen is that eBay are trying to show the price for the option that they think I’ll choose. This could be based on sales from that actual listing and/or historical data based on the search term I use and the option that previous buyers have actually purchased.

That makes sense, after all if almost all buyers that search for a duvet end up buying a king size duvet then showing prices for single duvets would be misleading. By narrowing my search for a “Double Duvet” that tells eBay to display the price for the Double, although they still have to predict which tog rating would be of most interest – again sales history on the listing as well as historical category sales would help decide which price to display.

eBay appear to be using similar technology to choose which price to display in the same way that Best Match decides which items to return first in search results. As a search is narrowed by using more keywords then the price displayed will be more accurate as eBay identifies which option on the Multi-Variation listing matches that particular buyer’s requirements.

The current solution for pricing isn’t elegant – it can lead to some items in search results appearing more expensive than others even if that’s not the case for the variation I’m actually looking for. The more specific my search the more accurate the prices displayed become.

It’s worth noting that if you change the sort order to say “Price: lowest first” that the lowest price item will be displayed from the Multi-Variation listing.

The big question is are eBay doing the right thing in displaying a price based on the option they think the buyer may choose? Should they display the highest or the lowest price for a listing or should a range of prices be displayed in search? If you were designing Multi-Variation how would you choose what price to display?

The paper entitled “A Study on the Impact of Product Images on User Clicks for Online Shopping” by Anjan Goswami, Naren Chittar and Sung H. Chung, describes experiments to try and augment eBay’s search ranking function with features derived from the images of an item.

Examples of image features include the amount of illumination, contrast, dynamic range and the characteristics of the background. eBay’s results show that better images result in better clicks and sales.

The research builds on eBay’s “More Like This ImageSearch” technology and improving the quality of sellers’ images and the way they use image information are important topics for eBay.

What this means for sellers is that it’s likely in the future that the quality and clarity of your images will begin to be reflected in your Best Match ranking. Dark pictures, images where the product isn’t centred and in the foreground of your picture, blurred images, and images without contrasting backgrounds may soon mean that your eBay listings isn’t shown to potential buyers.

Product shot before and after processing by Fluid Mask

If you’re had recent sales or a boost for being a Top Rated Seller or for offering free shipping then this is not currently being reflected in search results. On the other hand there’s some good news if you’re an under-performing seller and being demoted in search… at the moment your listings are getting the same level of exposure as Top Rated Sellers.

No doubt the issue will be fixed in the not too distant future, but in the mean time if you gain some sales on a fixed price listing which is about to end make sure that you relist it as soon as possible – Once Best Match is mended you could receive an undeserved boost in search which can only be good for future sales.

Best Match on the Canadian site has for some time given a boost in search to domestic items, in the belief that buying from your own country is a better buying experience than a cross border transaction. This will be suspended if you’re in one of the test groups so that eBay can gauge how much the item location affects buyer behaviour.

For sure it’s often a simpler quicker buying experience to buy from a domestic seller but I’m constantly amazed when I buy from overseas just how quickly items are delivered – often faster than some UK sellers appear able to despatch.

We know that many TameBay readers are based overseas, but sell into the UK. Also many sellers based in the UK make a large proportion of their income through selling outside the UK. How important is cross border trade to your business? Would you prefer equal visibility for yourself and sellers from other EU countries, what about the Far East or sellers from the US where customs charges come into play?

Wouldn’t it be cool, I thought to myself, if Best Match was clever enough to see that I hadn’t specified a season, even though tWW has seven, and to figure out that what I’m *probably* looking for, then, is the complete complete set, rather than any one season, and show me those first.

And then, coincidentally, Adam Nash wrote a post about the same thing. If you don’t know Adam, he used to work for eBay, and he is exceptionally smart, so when his colleague Ikai unfavourably compared the prices of Deep Space 9 DVD sets available on eBay and Amazon, he set out to figure out why eBay looked like such a bad deal.

Here’s what he found (republished with permission).

The Q&A after the official content is well worth listening too as there’s information on the likes of how best to work with Best Match when selling one off unique items (and the answer wasn’t just to use auctions ) and also the promise of a tool in the near future to help you understand how your impressions, item clicks and sales are performing.

Disclosure – ChannelAdvisor advertise with TameBay

Billed as “Making Best Match Work For You“, the webinar will be hosted by ChannelAdvisor and eBay with Susanne Kaden, Manager Best Match Europe for eBay on hand to answer your questions and give tips on how you can improve your listings visibility.

This is one event not to miss, the opportunity to put your Best Match questions to the experts. There’s been a lot of interest in Best Match since the articles appeared, even as far away as Australia. Yesterday I was invited onto the Oz Round Table forum to talk about Best Match strategies and found that the Aussies have pretty much the same questions as us in the UK. If you’ve still got Best Match questions there’s no one better placed than Susanne to answer them.

Sign up early for the Best Match webinar as places are limited.

Disclosure: ChannelAdvisor advertise with TameBay

eBay told us this morning that yes, they have stopped hiding duplicate listings, because they believe these no longer offer sellers any advantage: in fact, they are likely to make a seller’s listings perform worse under Best Match:

Since the full roll out of the latest version of Best Match we believe that duplicate listings no longer give a seller an advantage as we now rate on recent sales divided by search impressions. If a seller makes duplicate listings it will spread their sales per impression score across many items and as a result that listing will drop down in search.

If you’ve been listing duplicates and find your items slipping in search result position, this may well be the reason. However counter-intuitive it feels to list fewer items, listing extra BINs will hurt you under Best Match. And of course, it leaves you vulnerable to reporting by competitors.

A couple of other points while we’re on this topic: last week, we were contacted by a seller who had been told by his account manager that eBay had “for legal reasons”, discontinued the automatic removal of duplicate listings. We were pretty surprised by this, as we’d never heard either from eBay or from sellers that this was being done. eBay have said that duplicate listings aren’t and never have been automatically removed: the only time they are removed is when they’re reported, and this is done manually.

It’s worth also saying that eBay point out a large number of reports on duplicates relate to auction listings, not to BINs. Sellers may run up to 15 identical auctions, so don’t waste your time reporting them unless there really are more than that number.

The first parts to this series are:
Best Match Secrets Part 1: Getting found
Best Match Secrets Part 2: How products are sorted

1) Be a good seller

This is the most important aspect of Best Match. If you don’t reach minimum sellers standards your listings will be actively demoted in Best Match, and by a significant amount. It’s not just that you won’t be on the first page of Best Match, it means that all of your listings (auctions and fixed price) will be at the bottom on the last page of search results. Being demoted will have a devastating effect on your sales as no matter how great your product and price you’ll be at the bottom in the place buyers are least likely to see.

Standard and Above standard sellers will be mixed with Top Rated Sellers in Best Match. Top Rated sellers will receive a boost in search results and their listings will also be highlighted in search so that even if their item isn’t the most relevant under Best Match it will catch a buyers eye as they browse the page.

2) Long Duration Listings

Use long duration, preferably 30 day listings, and place all of your inventory of a product onto a single listing. Consider using Featured First if you are a Top Rated Seller and, if available in your categories, use Multi Variant Listings to fold all of your inventory into a single listing. This becomes particularly important when considering popularity.

3) Popularity – Sales/Impressions

When Best Match was first introduced “Recent Sales” – how often an item had previously been purchased, was used to judge which listings were most likely to appeal to buyers. This led to listings which had previously received many purchases sticking to the top of sales results even if a new listing was a better deal. eBay have now combined recent sales with impressions to allow better deals to quickly displace incumbent listings from the top of search results.

Best Match will consider how many sales your listing has achieved, in conjunction with how many times a buyer has seen your item on the search results page. The more sales you get compared to impressions the better score your listing will have and the higher up the page it’ll appear.

4) Correct Price / Title

Once your product is seen by a potential buyer they need to know that it’s the right product for them. Your title needs to contain relevant keywords confirming it’s the item the buyer wants and the price needs to be attractive in order for them to buy.

Don’t forget that keyword spamming will actively lower your product in search results due to sales/impressions ratio. Sellers have become more adept at keyword spamming by choosing irrelevant brands in Item Specifics in a attempt to get their product found. Best Match will take account of this with the sales/impression score so whilst listing a non-branded handbag with “Prada” as an Item Specific may initially get you an increase in impressions, buyers looking for a Prada handbag are unlikely to buy and ultimately your listing will sink to the bottom.

5) Free Shipping

Like it or not free shipping is attractive to buyers. eBay have revealed that all things being equal buyers will purchase items with free shipping more often than the same item with shipping charged separately. For that reason if you list with free shipping not only will you receive a small boost in Best Match, but it’ll increase your sales helping your sales/impression popularity rating.

Best Match Tutorial

Take the example of a seller who has sold 100 t-shirts from a single Multi-Variation Listing. You might expect the seller to have a recent sales score of 100 but this isn’t the case. The seller will have a score based on the highest individual variation recent sales score that fits the search term.

If for example a buyer searched for “Red T-shirt” in this example the seller has sold fifty red t-shirts (10+18+22) but the highest individual recent sales score is 22 so that’s what’ll determine your position in Best Match. Searching for a “Medium T-shirt will return a recent sales score of 18, but if the buyer searches for Medium Blue T-Shirt then the recent sales score will be just 13.

eBay say this is to stop the larger sellers swamping the smaller sellers, but it opens the question as to whether the larger sellers will want to use Multi-Variation Listings in the first place. With the current choice policy you can offer a selection of colours so long as you have sufficient stock to fulfill all orders in any colour. Offering a medium t-shirt with a colour choice of red/blue/green on a normal multi-quantity listing with the same sales of 18+13+5 will give a recent sales score of 36 instead of a maximum of 18.

Sellers will also need to consider the use of keywords in their titles. Although colour and size choices will be picked up for item specifics the item title will be too short to include all variations of colour and size. Currently items specifics for items such as “Mens Shorts” are S/M/L/XL – if I’m searching for waist size 34″ item specifics are of no use to me and unless you have 34″ in the title I won’t find your product. (Is a 34″ waist medium or large?).

It may prove that Multi-Quantity Listings make stock management easier for sellers to manage their stock, but it remains to be seen if sellers will get better visibility from recent sales with existing choice listings or by maintaining one listing for each product variation.

There is also some clarification on how UK listings with ISV will appear on eBay.com if they offer paper payment methods which have now been banned for US eBayers. James, eBay UK’s community manager, wrote on the PowerSeller board:

As long as you are offering a safe payment method then your listings will show on the US Site. How this works is when you purchase ISV (because you need to offer PayPal as a requirement for ISV) if the listing also offers cheques/ money orders, then these payment methods will be removed & not appear as options on the US site.

We’re still waiting for clarification of what will happen to listings which offer paper payments within the body of the description. For now, if you’re paying for ISV, then avoiding mention of paper payment methods in your description is probably the safest route to take.

Free shipping

• All sellers who offer free shipping will get free subtitle listing enhancement.
• PowerSellers who offer free shipping will get double FVF discounts.
• Sellers are reminded that listings with free shipping get a boost in Best Match.

Media Categories

All sellers get 5c insertion fees and free subtitle when they list using pre-filled item information.

These offers apply only on eBay.com. Other eBay sites have different fee structures.

eBay emphasized the difference between Search and Best Match – Search determines which products are selected based on the keywords a buyer searches for. Sellers need to understand what terms buyers use and include popular alternatives in 55 character title. (eg motorcycle/motorbike). Good keywords, along with selecting the best category and item specifics, will avoid your item being filtered out of search results before they’re sorted by Best Match.

Once a set of search results is found they are then sorted with Best Match. For auctions the only criteria for Best Match are DSRs (4.4 or above to avoid demotion) and Ending Soonest.

Fixed price items are sorted in Best Match on a combination of factors which vary by category. Best Match responds to recent buying patterns so it evolves according to which combination of sorting criteria is working best for that particular category, including Recent Sales, title relevance, 30 day DSRs and price.

Recent Sales is the most important factor but does vary by category. Where few multi-quantity items are listed then the title and price become more important. Time ending soonest is not a factor for sorting fixed price items in Best match. If Recent Sales, DSRs and the title can’t distinguish between listings then price becomes the deciding factor in determining the sort order.

The price used in Best Match does not include P&P but reasonable charges will help keep DSRs high and avoid demotion. If any of your DSRs fall below 4.4 then both auctions and BINs are demoted.

Don’t split sales across multiple listings – from January you’ll only be allowed one fixed price listing for each product line you sell. Gaining sales on a single listing over the Christmas period will put you ahead of any competitors still running multiple listings for each product and in a months time they’ll have no listings with large numbers of recent sales.

Recent Sales boosts will be lost when you relist if you: Increase the start price; change the category; change the title; change the item condition. You can add to the item description, but not change existing description.

Ideas for driving sales include using Best Offer or MarkDown Manager for pricing promotions and using Featured First and Featured Plus to increase visibility.

One final tip which is a new one to me, Item Specifics are used to determine which products are returned in search results. If you’re selling a shirt and you specify “Denim” as the fabric but don’t have it in the item title it will be included in searches for “Denim Shirt”. However when Best Match sorts the search results it does not use Item Specifics. This means a shirt with Denim in item specifics may not be considered as relevant as one that has Denim in the actual title. Although Item Specifics are useful for appearing in search it’s still the keywords in the title that are the most important.

eBay Search and Finding has changed beyond all recognition over the last year but the fundamentals remain the same: Use good keywords, fill out all available fields including item specifics, select the most appropriate category and price competitively, provide top quality service to your buyers and pretty much everything else will take care of itself.

The event takes place on Tuesday 9th December at 3.00pm and will cover hints and tips on Best Match as well as the fundamentals of appearing in search with time for Q&A.

If you want to know why your product isn’t appearing in search, or why a competitors product is placed above yours in Best Match this is where you can get the answers from the people that manage the site.

But this doesn’t feel quite like the whole story to me. If the policy works, and sellers are changing their behaviour as desired because of it, why change the policy? The duplicate listings policy was – at least in part – intended to stop a few huge sellers dominating particular categories: might we assume that eBay are now happy to have one or two or their largest sellers dominant after all?

eBay.com will continue to show a maximum of ten listings per seller per search results page. Sellers should at least spread their listings out over time rather than listing in ‘clumps’ to try to avoid having them hidden under this policy.