Cash In With Title Mistakes

Sometimes the most effective eBay listing titles are "wrong." What do I mean? Misspellings and other errors buyers make when searching for your product can be used to your advantage. You will connect best with your buyers when you help them find your product, whether they enter their search correctly or not!

Hi, eBay sellers! I'm Jen Cano with HammerTap, an eBay Certified Solution Provider. Keep reading and you'll learn how to make more on your eBay listings by understanding common mistakes eBay buyers make.

How Can a Single Letter Improve Your Listing Success by 41.2%?
What if I told you that you could change a single letter in your eBay listing title and increase your chance to sell by 41.2%? Hard to believe? Let's see.





Figure 1 shows that listings with "laptop computer" in the title closed successfully 54.2% of the time. On average, they closed for $214.53.

Research Tip One: Look Carefully at Misspellings
Through eBay listing research, we just learned that changing one letter in a listing title dramatically increases the listing success rate and the selling price. You wouldn’t likely find this out any other way.

So, tip number one when using research to decide on a title is to look carefully at misspellings. It will only take a minute or two to compare listings with the correct spelling vs. listings with the incorrect spelling.

With HammerTap, you can use the Keywords window to cross compare every word included in every title in your research set. If you begin with category-level research, this means you are going to get to look at all the misspellings of search words for that category.

i DON'T SEE ANY OTHER REPLIES....I AM VERY INTERESTED IN LEARNING ABOUT TITLE SEARCHES.

It’s Not About You, It’s About Your Buyer!
Remember, when you are creating a listing title, it’s important to get into the mind of the buyer. It’s not about what’s correct or incorrect. It’s about how your buyers will find your listing.




In Figure 3, we see that the word “and,” spelled out, worked much better for making a sale than the & symbol. This was true for all four of our dynamic duos, whether it was the correct way to type it or not.

Why, Why, Why? And Does it Matter?
Why did more buyers search for Dolce & Gabbana or Brooks & Dunn with the word “and”?

I think it might be because it takes a little more effort and coordination to type the & symbol. It’s a fast-paced world. It’s just more complicated to press that shift key with the pinky finger of one hand, while at the same time reaching for the & symbol with the index finger of the other hand. (Trust me, I’ve done it twenty or so times during this workshop, alone—it’s a pain.) It could also be because buyers don’t know which way is correct.

We could speculate about this all day (no matter how sure I am about my first theory).

The great thing about research is that it doesn’t matter! You don’t really have to know why your buyers search the way they do. You only have to know how they search and then create your listing to match. In this case, we only have to know that they are looking for all four of these dynamic duos with the word “and,” not the & symbol!
Caution! Remember, we’ve run the research for these four dynamic duos and no others. There are many, many other dynamic duos. Buyers of those items might use the & symbol instead of the word “and” for other products. The only way you can know for sure is to do your own research.

What Words Should You Leave Out?
Now for another listing title “mistake.”
I graduated with a degree in English Literature. For me, credit to the author always goes without saying. It’s automatic. But, when it’s time to build a listing for a book, does the same hold true?

Again, I have to stop thinking about what the correct way to list it would be. I have to ask how buyers will look for it. Let’s take a look at Figure 4, below, to decide how to build a title for the book War and Peace.