eBay Hacks, 2nd Edition

Track Your Exposure

See how findable your listings are and use this information to improve future sales.

You have at your disposal all the tools available to your bidders, which means that you should be able to locate any of your listings in only a few seconds. If you can’t, neither can they.

Figure 4-7. Use Terapeak’s Search Trends tab to view a running tab of daily total sales over the past month

Although listing upgrades such as Bold, Highlight, and Featured Plus! [Hack #46] can make your listing more visible (and thus easier to find), they can also double or triple the cost of your insertion fees. Unless you can measure their effect, however, it’s hard to determine if your money has been well spent.

Start by doing a quick search, not only for the specific keywords in your title but for anything your customers might type to find items like yours. If your item doesn’t appear when it should, return to your listing [Hack #65] and take a moment to add any necessary keywords [Hack #47] .

Where Is an Item?

eBay provides another handy tool that is used for locating a single item in eBay’s various category listings. Go to Site Map → Where Is an Item, select the “Find location of item” option, and enter the item number of the auction you wish to track.

The results, shown in Figure 4-8, show the category and the page number on which the item currently appears. If the item is newly listed or ...