Designing a listing that secures consistent sales is vitally important to surviving within the competitve cut-throat marketplace. Often when competitor products, prices and feedback are similar the only way to differentiate your self is the use of effective marketing.

FIDELIS CORP have put together a series of guides to help businesses succeed within the ebay marketplace. The guides cover:

Listing Design, Product Imaging and Brand Management.

This guide covers Listing Design:

ITEM DESCRIPTION:
Perhaps the most important influence in the buyers purchase behaviour is your use of the item description. Here the potential buyer can obviously read about what you are selling and more importantly build a perception of what your business represents. Here you can strategically position your business to portray the image of: quality, corporate, friendly, fun, market leader, niche etc.. in-line with your corporate objectives.

We recommend designing a listing template and using this throughout all your listings. This will help build brand awareness / identification as you increase your business and the amount of products / services offered.

There are several options within the listing design: Traditional text, html images, html images and html text, traditional text and html images.

If your advertising budget is limited then the use of good wording with clear fonts and good text colours will go a very long way in securing sales, however, it will not contribute greatly towards your brand awareness. The standard format we recommend is:

• Item title
• Package contents
• Item description
• Your opinions or reviews (optional). Try not to make these too biased!
• A brief section about your business
• FAQ / Terms

Try and use different sized fonts for titles of each section, use a colour which you feel helps contribute to securing sales (FIDELIS CORP finds soft blue is a good colour to gain trust). Use the bold and italic functions to make a point on keywords! Try and make the item description a realistic length, so for a pencil case a paragraph would be sufficient. For a laptop several paragraphs with specifications would be adequate.


The most effective option is to use html within item descriptions (Example above). This enables you to insert logos, images, drop down boxes etc.. The basic way this works:

• Upload images or text to a web server (You will need a website and hosting for this)
• Upload the images using FTP software to the server
• On the ebay item description page, select html and insert the correct code to point to your images

The above sounds complicated and for a novice this maybe difficult to implement. There are several businesses which offer this service including us. Below is a link to our shop which uses the above method (Traditional text and html images).

Example of html within listings

This may take hours / days to build a template, however, once this is done, simply change the item title and description and you can have a new product listed within minutes! It is worth making the extra effort. Customers are not stupid and they will realise how much effort has gone into an item description, this will indicate your enthusiasm and committment to gain sales, build trust and brand awareness!

If you intend to expand and use the marketplace for some period of time we would recommend using html. One of the greatest benefits of ths option is you have the option to update certain parts of all listings at once. For example: you want to promote a new item, you want to inform customers of last post dates for Christmas, seasonal images etc..


Legal - We do not recommend using lots of manufacturer logo within the same listing. For example: Sony, Sandisk, HP, Nokia, Toshiba etc.. If you do not have permission to re-use one of the logos and one the those companies makes an IP complaint then all of the listings will be removed. However, if this logo is only represented in 10% of your listings your risk and exposure is much less.

We would not recommend copying word for word item descriptions from ebay and external websites. If you found a competitor has cut and pasted your description you would be understandably frustrated and take the relevant legal action.