Top 5 ways to rank higher in Cassini Search on eBay
When eBay rolled out its new search engine, Cassini, in June a lot of things changed for eBay sellers. Doing things the old school way doesn’t work anymore. Many sellers are confused as to why their traffic and sales have dropped since Cassini’s update. Cassini is designed to provide consumers with a more targeted shopping experience. It is about the buyer, not the seller. Many strategies that sellers have been using for years no longer work, and even more importantly, sellers can be punished for doing them. Here are 5 ways to increase visibility on eBay and reach the customers who will actually buy your product.
Views vs. purchases. Cassini looks at the relationship between how many times your listing has been seen and the number of sales you generate. It is no longer a good thing to have lots of views without purchases. Be careful with blasting your listings all over Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest – if you are getting a lot of views and not so many purchases, Cassini punishes that and drops the listing lower in search. The objective is to let buyers find your item organically. Furthermore, a large number of views is irrelevant if nobody is purchasing the item. A lower number of targeted views is much more conducive to a sale.
Write titles for a buyer, not a search engine. Keyword stuffing is dead on eBay. It is no longer advisable to use all the characters in the space for the title. Use what is relevant to the buyer, and put the words in the same order a buyer would. For example, if you are selling a pair of Levis jeans, an old title might be, “Mens darkwashed bootcut jeans Levis 34×34 pants 5 pocket denim dungarees casual.” A customer isn’t going to search for jeans using those words in that order. A better title for Cassini is, “Mens Levis jeans 34×34 boot cut dark wash.” The order of words in the title is important to Cassini. A great way to test this is to search for the same type of item you are selling on eBay and watch what eBay starts to prefill in the search bar. Also avoid category stuffing – don’t put an item in more than one category just to get more views. Put it in the category where it belongs.
Fill in all item specifics. Don’t skip those little boxes with check marks that describe the item like color, brand, size, style, country of manufacture. It seems repetitive if you have this information in your title and description, but eBay also wants it here. Also, add an item specific if something relevant isn’t there.
Keep your account healthy. Cassini likes healthy accounts in good standing. Cassini looks at seller performance including feedback, top-rated status, detailed seller ratings, customer service and disputes history, communication, and shipping time. Serious sellers who really want to get sales offer 1-day processing time (get the item in the mail in 24 hours), respond to customer questions ASAP, handle disputes quickly to keep the customer happy, and go above and beyond to be the better seller. Getting to the top of Cassini is work, so be prepared to do what it takes. This is called the cost of doing business. Sometimes you have to do things for the sake of keeping the overall business healthy.
Proofread text and write a good listing. If you do all the above correctly, and your item is viewed, don’t lose a sale because your listing is sloppy. Text needs to be free of grammatical or spelling errors and organized in an easy to read format. Cut down on the long seller policies about returns, shipping, and other information that clogs up the description section. (Do you read all that as a buyer? Probably not.) A long description turn off buyers and Cassini doesn’t like it. With Cassini, it can be worse to place well in search results lose a sale than to have not appeared at all. Use one color font, preferable black, left-align text (best for mobile shoppers), and use a font that is big enough to read on a mobile device. Short, sweet, and to the point works best, and if your buyer has questions, answer them promptly.