Search ranking is very important for both buyers and sellers. The eBay platform has its own internal search engine – Cassini.
Different from the method of Amazon search engine optimization, eBay requires sellers to match the products they publish with Cassini as much as possible. Before ranking products, Cassini generally checks four aspects, namely product title, product details, category, and other competing products. Similar to Amazon, Cassini also needs to check whether the product provides corresponding value to the seller, the comprehensive indicators of the store, and the store evaluation. For example: when the seller sells a product, Cassini will track and collect the seller’s return policy, product information click-through rate, evaluation, and response time, which will become the standard for Cassini ranking.
From this we can see that for eBay’s Cassini search engine, the focus needs to be on two points: product optimization and store optimization.
Product optimization includes the following.
(1) The core of product optimization is mainly keyword optimization. The key point is that a title cannot have only one keyword, but should be composed of different long and short keywords.
(2) Product titles and descriptions should be consistent with the products being sold. False information should not be provided to “please” searchers, which will cause buyers to have negative emotions and cause product sales to drop instead of increase, which is not worth the loss.
(3) Since eBay users can select or filter specific details, the specific introduction information should also be paid attention to: categories should be concise and accurate. For example, when sellers sell TVs, they should set their main category to electrical appliances, without setting other categories such as electronic products. If the product sold by the seller already exists in the eBay category, you only need to enter the UPC or EAN, and eBay will automatically fill in the remaining information.
Store optimization includes the following.
(1) Buyer reviews. Cassini will rank stores or products based on buyer reviews. Positive reviews are a very important factor in changing search engine rankings.
(2) Logistics and delivery. In fact, eBay will not increase or decrease the ranking of sellers based on whether they offer free shipping, but free shipping can indeed increase buyer satisfaction and the conversion rate will be much higher than that of products with shipping costs, thereby indirectly changing search rankings.
(3) Return policy. Similar to logistics and delivery, the eBay platform prefers sellers with more positive reviews, and the return policy can also indirectly increase the seller’s positive review rate.