It’s a bone of contention amongst many eBay sellers. After battling their way to the top of eBay search through the implementation of listing optimisation best practices (paid and organic), sellers still do not own their eBay listing pages.

eBay product pages have to share a substantial part of their listings with their competitors’ offers. In fact, buyers will be given several opportunities to visit similar sponsored items before they have the chance to view your complete product description and company details. For generic items, this means a sale can be quickly won or lost on price alone, with lower-priced competitive offers quickly destroying your conversion rates.

Tough love time. This problem isn’t about to go away any time soon. As advertising revenue becomes increasingly important to eBay’s business model, sellers must work smarter and harder to retain their competitive advantage.

Your First Line of Defence

The good news is there is nothing particularly complicated about taking greater ownership of your eBay listings. Instead, it’s often very much a case of following those eBay listing best practices that Frooition (and eBay itself) constantly bang on about.

Great product images are your first line of defence. A high-quality photograph will make your product stand out above the competition, even when you cannot compete on price. Remember, the more images you share, the more opportunity you create for potential buyers to engage with your listings. eBay now allows you to share up to 24 images with your listings. Use them well.

Price is, of course, very important. However, there are several other levers you can pull before your potential buyer is introduced to the competition. These levers include your product title, shipping fees, delivery schedules and return policies.

In the mobile environment, buyers are also presented with the first few lines of your product description. Don’t waste this opportunity by repeating the information in your product title.

To use old print publishing terminology, all of this information can be described as “above the fold” – it’s designed to make you want to read on – and in the case of your eBay product pages, skip the sponsored listings that are featured directly below.

Make an Impact

When you optimise your “above the fold” information, you reduce the potential impact of the sponsored ads positioned on your page and encourage people to go deeper into your listings.

The good news is a lot of people are “ad blind” and will subconsciously ignore sponsored posts. Others may block sponsored posts – although eBay is very good at outfoxing ad-blockers and continue to serve sponsored content unabated.

When buyers scroll past the sponsored content (or click to read the full description on mobile), you need to encourage them to become fully invested in your content. This means making an impact with your design and content so that your offer becomes the most compelling opportunity on the screen. In short – you want to own the relationship. This relationship starts with great content and functional design.

Content-Led Design

Frooition’s bespoke eBay design templates aren’t just designed to look great. Instead, they are optimised to deliver the maximum impact for your content. Essentially, they position the right content in the right place so that your potential buyers can make a quick and informed buying decision.

Functional eBay design isn’t just about the use of colours and images. It’s about guiding your potential customer through the sales process, persuading them that they have found the right product and you are the right person to sell it to them.

Trust is, of course, a significant issue on an online marketplace like eBay.

Great design and considered content will separate the “professional” seller from occasional and private sellers.

Our professional eBay listing software powers Frooition’s beautiful and functional design templates. This removes much of the repetitive nature of listing and selling on eBay. Some aspects of your content, such as your “about us” section or your shipping and returns policies, need only be written once and automatically entered into your listings. It also allows for any alterations to your content to be applied automatically in bulk, saving you countless man-hours and reducing errors and contradictory listings.

Frooition’s design templates also enable sellers to include cross-promotional tools designed to keep buyers in your listings and not at the mercy of eBay search or competitive ads.

The Elephant in the Room

There’s no getting away from it. Creating engaging content is difficult and time-consuming. But when sellers have to do more to make their listings stand out and compete, it’s a job that cannot be ignored.

Sellers with particularly deep inventory may struggle to comprehend how they can even start with a job of content optimisation. Our advice is don’t let perfection be the enemy of the good and start small by optimising your best-selling items and new listings. Then, when time allows, focus on the long tail.

Are you using content-led design to optimise your eBay listings? To learn more about how you can create more compelling and attractive listings on eBay to compete with your competitors’ ads, check out our free eBay Listing Optimisation tool.