I run Close The Deal, a small online consignment business here in Durango. Most of my day is photographing, pricing and listing other people’s things, so when items sit unsold it costs me time and it costs my clients money. This summer I stopped guessing and pulled thirty days of traffic data on every active listing in my own eBay store: 806 of them.
The short answer: most eBay listings that do not sell have a visibility problem, not a price problem. In my store, 63 listings were never shown to a single buyer in thirty days, and 536 were shown and never clicked once. Cutting the price fixes neither of those.
What does it mean when a listing is never shown?
eBay counts an impression every time a listing appears in front of a buyer in search results. A listing with zero impressions is not losing on price. Nobody ever saw the price. It is being filtered out before a buyer gets the chance.
The usual cause is the part of the listing sellers skip: the title and the item specifics. When a buyer filters a search by size, brand or model, eBay only shows listings that have that field filled in. Leave the size blank and your jacket simply does not exist to anyone who searched for a medium.
Why would a listing be shown and never clicked?
This was the biggest group in my store, 536 listings. Here eBay did its part and put the item in front of buyers, and they scrolled past. In a search result a buyer sees three things: one photo, one line of title and a price. If those three do not answer “is this the thing I want” in about a second, they keep scrolling.
The worst example I found was a batch where the lead photo was of the sealed bag rather than what was inside it. Those listings were shown 3,223 times and opened 25 times. Same items, same prices. Once the photo showed the actual item, people clicked.
How much of the title are sellers actually using?
eBay gives you 80 characters of title, and every one of them is searchable. In my own store, 384 of the 806 listings used fewer than 65 characters, and the middle value was 55. That is 25 characters of search terms left on the table on a typical listing, words a buyer could have typed and did not find me by. It is the cheapest fix there is, because it costs nothing but typing.
When is it really the price?
Only in the third group: listings that buyers clicked, looked at, and did not buy. That is the one place price is usually the reason. Even then, I price off what identical items actually sold for in the last ninety days, not what other sellers are asking. Asking prices are fiction. Anyone can list anything at any number and leave it there for a year.
What I changed in my own listings
- Fill in every item specific eBay offers, especially size, brand, model and material. Blank fields remove you from filtered searches.
- Use the whole 80 character title: brand, what it is, model, size, color, then condition.
- Make the lead photo the item itself, clean and filling the frame. Not the box, not the bag, not a group shot.
- Price from sold listings over the last 90 days, and only cut the price on items that are getting clicked but not bought.
- Plan for the item that does not sell, with scheduled price reductions, instead of letting it sit.
Where I think online selling is heading
This part is my opinion from the seller’s chair, not a statistic. The marketplaces keep leaning harder on structured information: item specifics, categories, filters. More and more buyers start their search from filters and from shopping tools built on top of search, and those tools can only find what a listing actually says about itself.
That favors the seller who does the boring part well. A complete, accurate listing gets found. A clever title with half the details missing gets skipped, however good the item is. For a small business like mine, that is good news: careful work beats a big ad budget.
Want help with yours?
If you have a shop, a collection or a garage full of good things that are not moving, that is exactly what our consignment service is for. We photograph, list, sell and ship, and you get paid for what sells. If you sell on eBay yourself and want these same numbers for your own store, that is what Close The Leak does.