Good afternoon! Welcome to this months eBay Marketplace Research workshop. Today John Bodine and Nick Donelson will be discussing how you can leverage eBay Marketplace Research to Build more effective Titles

We have prepared several posts in advance which will help illustrate the main points of the topic but will also be answering questions you might have and providing recommendations based on your questions!

It might also be useful to look at the previous workshop hosted by Terapeak on creating effective titles, that workshop can be found here.

Before we begin, I should mention that all of the data used in today’s workshop was obtained by using eBay Marketplace Research. If you are not familiar with the product you can click the link to find out more about eBay Marketplace Research.

Thanks for joining us today, if you have any questions, please jump right in and ask!

A title can only contain 55 characters, precious real estate by any standard. The most successful sellers recognize that a good title will improve sales and enable buyers to find your items quickly and efficiently. With these 55 characters we want to do our best to achieve the three objectives outlined above. It is important to use those 55 characters wisely, only adding extra words after you have accomplished the main goal.

Some general information about a listing title can be found on our Best Practices page.

As mentioned above, the first thing a title must do is help buyers find your item. The key here is to think like a buyer. If you were to type one or two words to find your item what would they be?

For example, if you were looking to purchase a digital camera what would you first type in the search box? “digital camera” “casio exilim” “canon powershot”?

eBay Marketplace Research helps you understand buyer behavior with the Top Searches module. This part of eBay Marketplace Research provides information on up to 20 top searches for any category and will also help you understand how buyers might narrow their search through subsequent search terms.

Here you see that when buyers are in the Cameras & Photo Category the top search terms are “digital camera”, “nikon”, “canon”, and “sony”. It is therefore very important to include both the specific brand and the more generic fact that is it a digital camera in the title. Further down in the list you can see that some buyers type “sony digital camera” as the full search term but this behavior is less common than just “digital camera” or the brand.

If we happen to be selling a Casio Exilim camera we can also use eBay Marketplace Research to better understand the words buyers use when they have also used the word Casio. To do this, we type the word “Casio” in the Keyword(s) box and click

As you can see, buyers looking for a Casio camera are most likely to include the words “exilim, ex-s500, digital camera, ex s600, z50”. Note that in some cases the buyers include a dash in the model and in the case of the EX S600 the dash was not included. Experiment with your title, including one or the other to find which title works best.

The title can also be used as a merchandising tool, drawing the buyer’s eye to your item in the list of returned items. The most common way to draw attention is to play around with the case. For example, adding the word NEW in all caps or including various punctuation as a form of decoration or eye-catching pattern. Other examples include using a series of *’s to begin and end the title or using @’s in place of the letter “o” in the word “look”. Play around with different titles to see what works best for you.

As you can see, this seller included the brand, the model in caps, the model number, color, accessories, condition, and information about how they treat their customers. All that in 55 characters!

While there are certainly other factors which will determine the final price one gets for an item, we hope the items discussed will help you become better sellers.