The importance of first impressions cannot be overstated. On eBay, a buyer’s first impression of a seller is usually the title of an auction listing. Auction titles are a seller’s first chance to really grab someone’s attention and entice them to click the link and learn more about the merchandise. If the auction title is good, it will bring more business. If it’s bad, it can get your auction ignored – or even removed.
Take an honest look at your auction titles. Are they a little on the bland side, or do they inform readers about the item in exciting terms? You want to convince buyers to click on your auction without annoying them. Filling a title with excessive punctuation and special characters with no purpose other than to attract attention often backfires. Some eBay auction titles are so full of gibberish that it’s hard to tell exactly what is being offered for sale. If a buyer finds your auction titles obnoxious, they will go with a more readable auction title from a competitor. It would be a shame to lose business just because your auction titles were too boring or too outlandish.
Do a search for completed auctions for items like the ones you sell. Look at the auction titles for inspiration. You will likely find that most of the high winners were well-written, and included specific item details. If your item is a brand name, say so in the title. If it’s new and has never been used or worn, put that in the title as well. Details make the difference between buyers clicking on your item or someone else’s.
Don’t assume that all potential buyers will search for an item’s proper spelling. Typos happen all the time. There are tools you can use, such as the free web site Fatfingers.Com, which reveal the most common misspellings of eBay search terms. You might want to drop one or two of these in your auction title, just in case. (Incidentally, you can also use misspelled searches to find low-cost items to buy and resell. Typos in titles reduce the number of bids on items, which you can use to your advantage.)
Alternate spellings should also be utilized. For example, if you’re selling a computer on Ebay, you might state that it has a 500 gig hard drive, a 500GB HD, a 500GB disk, and so on. Try to think of terms that a buyer would actually search for, and use more than one of them.
How does one write a title so terrible that eBay would actually remove the auction? By keyword stuffing. This involves stuffing a title with dozens of keywords that will show up often in searches, but which have no relevance to the actual item. For example, a seller wants to sell a Dallas Cowboys football jersey. In the auction title, the seller also lists the names of twenty other pro football teams, knowing that their auction will turn up in more searches because of it. However, buyers who search for a Green Bay Packers jersey will be frustrated when they come across the keyword-stuffed listing and find that it’s not what they were looking for. Hence, keyword stuffing is a bad idea. And it can get your account suspended.
Auction titles are the very first layer of marketing your goods on eBay. Of course, your superior item quality and outstanding customer service will keep customers coming back for more, but you need great titles to attract them in the first place.
