I’m modifying my workflow today to try the Relist-after-24-hours (vs. Stop and Relaunch) approach to fishing for buyers, and I’m reminded that I stumbled across something else recently that seems to have had a strange positive effect, too.
I recently edited by Store Categories, and while I was doing that I discovered several listings that were essentially labeled “backwards” in my current scheme. I sell books, and I have a Store Category like “Novels" which I now think of as “broad, primary”, and another like “Fantasy" which I now treat like “detailed, secondary”.
This is literally just back-office convenience for me, I’m sure. It can’t possibly make a difference to a buyer, but it’s tidier for me to think this way and search for stuff in Smart Groups. So I spent some time last week looking for books where “Fantasy" was the primary store category and “Novels" was the secondary, and flipped them to my new personal standard.
Strangely enough, I flipped probably 50 out of 4000 listings that way, and I sold about 20 of the flipped ones almost immediately. (“Almost immediately” for me means “sold them within about 2 weeks, despite them being listed for ~6 months”)
I have no idea if this is anything, which is why the title is so vague. But I’m curious if by changing the store categories I somehow boosted those particular items, algorithm-wise.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
And yes I know eBay Discussions has stuff like this but I can’t stand to even look at them.
First off - I had no idea there was an eBay General discussion forum here - woohoo! I am so sorry for not using this for some of my past posts. Yikes.
2nd off - hello fellow book seller.
3rd off - that’s something I need to do a bit more. I have nested categories as I sell mostly books, but do have other things too. So I have a Books category, which simply has 5 sub categories- Fiction, Nonfiction, Lots/Bundles, Large Print, and Signed books.
“Fiction” is insanely broad [as is nonfiction!], so I may start to put a few of my more popular items into specific genres of fiction, though I am uncertain how many people browse my store using the categories. I do know that they do for on of my non-book categories [collectable aircraft] as I will get buyers messaging me about shipping discounts when they’ve spotted a few aircraft they want to buy.
The algorithm is a mystery and always will be except to those who work at eBay on it. But I would not be surprised if there was some impact on how an item is listed on a store. Also, if you send newsletters to those that have subscribed to your store, then those people might be more likely to. browse your store’s categories and buy something that way.
There’s a certain point I hit when I was helping an old friend clear her house out, where I had 10 years’ worth of antique collecting magazines, and also all of her antique reference books, and that provoked a lot of tension between “is this thing ‘book’ enough to not want it’s own category?” And then there’s a bound volume of a year’s issues, or a weird McSweeney’s which is more of a box of papers that are published as a magazine but have both an ISBN and an ISSN, and a never-published manuscript diary, &c &c
(I literally was going to get a PhD in Information Science at one point because of this BS)
The real reason I subdivide books though is just for running discounts. I can’t be bothered to manually sort through thousands of listings, when I can just add an entire store category when I want to do some marketing and inventory reduction.
More recently I’ve been sourcing from HiBid, and I end up opening a stinking box of 300 model train and trainspotting items from a museum, when I’ve never really even had a “Transportation” category.
The interesting thing is that adding new items to a new category (such as “trains” lately for me) doesn’t seem to bump sales like changing an old listing’s categories does.
I worked in a library for 8 years [if I ever had to go back to a “real” job, a library would be it for me]. Wanted to get an MLS [masters of library science] and never did. I worked in Tech Services, doing all kinds of awesome computer work and learned a ton about OCLC and how to catalog books and such - this was 1990-1998, so things have changed a bit since then But it was eye opening what all goes into cataloging a book. WAY more than I think most people would ever realize [kinda like most behind the scenes stuff!].
Interesting - perhaps the new train category, for you, isn’t as lucrative due to the fact your store is X percentage books/media. I know I hesitated bringing other things into my store since it was mostly books/media - I still don’t know how much traffic I am missing out on by not having a 2nd eBay seller account that just has collectables for example. I tend to think most buyers buy something purely based on searching for the item, rather than browsing random stores [though I have searched for an item as a buyer, and then browsed their store to see what else they had - useful for looking for older, refurbished Dell servers, for example].
Because the category was new to you, maybe it didn’t have as much weight as changing older categories for items you’ve had in your store longer.
Oh, LOL. No it’s 300 items that are all texts about trains.
I had no idea there were at least 4 publishers whose main output was “here are all the trains in the B&O line with pictures and tables”, or “here are all the trains from the 1870s West Virginia line that closed in 1920” &c
But it was eye opening what all goes into cataloging a book. WAY more than I think most people would ever realize [kinda like most behind the scenes stuff!].