News from Gazza
3,690,678 Live Listings
27,710 Categories
$3,783,330,197 Gross Listing Value
Welcome to the eBid March 2017 Newsletter.
March has seen a very active month for all of us here at eBid HQ. We have welcomed a large number of new sellers and have seen record numbers of items being listed via our mobile app. We've also broadened our range of categories even more during March to over 27,000 now in order to help you all find more suitable homes for your items.
Some great news this month for some of our international sellers. We've been spending a lot of time during March modifying our back-end systems to allow a number of other eBid countries to have their items for sale synced to the Google Shopping search engine. Until this month Google Shopping syncing was available to the larger eBid properties, namely the USA, UK, Germany, France, Australia, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Canada and Brazil.
eBid, as you know, is available to 23 individual countries worldwide with dedicated shipping and payment options for each and as of this week we are pleased to announce that the following countries will begin to have their items for sale synced with Google Shopping.
Ireland
New Zealand
Portugal
Malaysia
Belgium
Hong Kong
Denmark
Norway
Sweden
Singapore
South Africa
This brings the number of Google Shopping synced eBid sites to 21. Don't forget, all this is included at no extra cost within your SELLER+ account which is available to those who haven't upgraded yet for just
49.99 FOR LIFE
Some of you will have noticed the photos on eBid went a little haywire for a very short amount of time this month, our apologies for this. It was down to the hosting service we use from Amazon AWS which had a major outage which completely brought down some of the most popular websites on the internet.
Other updates this month :
BUGFIX - Some Android mobile devices were unable to scroll down the My Gallery overlay on the listing form
Interesting Items on eBid
Military Pilots Chronograph Watch $950.00
Phil Collins Autographed Drumhead $529.00
1990's Damien Hirst, Beautiful Spin Painting $3000.00
Yankee Stadium Authentic Piece of Black with Glass Display Case: Steiner COA C$420.00
Rare Antique Voigtlander Sterling Silver Opera Glasses Binoculars $599.00
1933 Double F + B French Horn $2900.00
Selling Tips
Importance of Category Choice
When listing an item for sale on eBid the first thing to decide is into which of our categories to place your item. Although this sounds like a no-brainer, a few of our sellers often choose the first category they come across that has a vague connection to their item. This can be counter-intuitive to the overall aims which are of course to sell the item in question. Placing the item in an incorrect category can hide your item from prospective buyers, for example a buyer simply browsing through the categories could by-pass your item on their way down to a lower-level more relevant sub-category.
Another example is a buyer searching for an item similar to yours using the eBid search engine, they find something that takes their eye and note the closely relevant category the interesting item is located in, they then click the link to view more items from this category and your item won't be in the category they find as it is not grouped together with similar items. Always take a little time getting to know our category layout and the closest fit category to your item.
Keywords, Keywords, Keywords
The most obvious but often overlooked optimisation tip you can make to ensure your item for sale gets seen is to make sure your listing titles contain RELEVANT keywords that your buyers are likely to use when searching for. For example, if you are selling a copy of GTA 5, instead of just using "GTA 5" as the title of your listing it could be easily optimised to "GTA V (Grand Theft Auto 5) on PlayStation 3 (PS3 Game)". Using this methodology your item will show for far more search results than it would have originally. Anyone searching for the long title or abbreviated title will find it, anyone using numbers or roman numerals and also general browsers of PS3 games will get to see your item. The more views your item receives increases the amount of sales you will make.
When writing titles to peak interest in your items always ensure you don't misspell anything. Our search systems do their best to cater for the more commonly misspelt words but many words won't get corrected and someone searching using the correct spelling won't be able to locate your misspelt listing.
Competition Time
Last Month's Question :
When a webpage is served over the secure HTTPS protocol. What is the icon that appears in your browser address bar to confirm this fact?
a) A KEY
b) A SAFE
c) A PADLOCK
The correct answer was (c) A PADLOCK. Congratulations go to Snap2Products from Leicestershire, UK for winning last month's competition, your eBid Goodie Bag and iPod should be with you now.
Now for this month's question :
How many individual eBid country sites now have their listings sycned with Google Shopping?
a) 5
b) 16
c) 21
To enter send us :
Answer to the competition question
Your eBid username
Name and address for sending out any prizes
Incomplete entries will be automatically deleted. Closing date 10th April 2017. Email answers to
competitions@ebid.net
Until next month,
Gazza & Mark