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If you’re an eBay seller, you should know that completed listings can be more valuable to you than current ones.  They allow you to see which items sell, what price they sell for, and perhaps more importantly, which items don’t sell. 

But the most valuable thing they can give you is the knowledge of how to write winning listings titles.  Have you ever looked up a product and found two sellers offering exactly the same item at the same price for the same postage charge… and only one of them is selling?

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Chances are it’s because one title is better than the other.  When you consider that the majority of people search for listings by title only and not by the description, it soon becomes obvious that the 55 characters (including spaces) you are allowed must work doubly hard to attract the attention of potential customers 

It’s also worth remembering that once you have created a listings title, it’s not set in stone.  You can alter and tweak it whenever it’s necessary, so long as you’ve had no bids on the item and it still has more than twelve hours to run.

When you’re creating a new title, it’s worth doing a little research into previous listings to see what works and what doesn’t.  Learning by your own mistakes is all very well, but you can save yourself money and time if you can learn by someone else’s!

Let me share one of my own errors that I managed to correct – albeit by accident.  My partner and I had bought some colour changing items that I had already researched on eBay and found to be a good seller.  I won’t reveal exactly what they are as it took us ages to locate them, and it’s not necessary for the purpose of the story anyway.  We could get them for a good price and were all set to double our money every time we sold a pack.

We took some photos, spent time creating a good title and a good listing, uploaded them… and waited.  We sold two packs, but then nothing.  A week later, I decided to have another look at our listing to see where we were going wrong.  We should have sold more by now…

So I went into completed listings and looked up the colour change items to see if they were still selling.  They were.  But I couldn’t find our listings.  We’d sold two packs, and they should have been on that page.  But they weren’t.

And then I realised where we were going wrong.  I double checked our listing title to confirm what I thought.

I was searching for ‘colour change’.  But in our listing we had put ‘colour changing’.  Those couple of letters made a huge difference in sales.  I altered the listing title, and within twelve hours we were selling again.  With that in mind I actually spent the next few hours going through all our listings titles and tweaking them here and there – in some cases adding a word, or taking one away, or even just changing a letter or two – making sure they would show up in as many search results as possible.

The lesson I learned was that you have to put yourself in the head of your customer when you list your items.  You may be excellent at spelling, and take pains to make sure everything is spelt correctly (and rightly so), but occasionally it can pay you to make a mistake or two.

If you search completed listings during October and November, for example, you will see lots of advent calendars for sale.  You will also notice that a lot of those listings will contain the word ‘calender’ as well.  It’s spelt wrongly, of course, but it’s a common spelling mistake, and switched on sellers know that.  They know if they put both versions of the word in their title, their item will be found by a lot more potential buyers.

If your item is new, you should say so, as some people use this to filter out the used items that are on sale.  But it’s not necessary to put ‘brand new’.  New will suffice, and it saves you six characters that can be put to good use elsewhere in your listing title.

It can also be a good idea to change your listing titles to coincide with certain times of the year.  Christmas is an excellent example, as many people are searching for ‘stocking fillers’ – we have found this is a good term to put in your listings titles, if you have the room.  If you sell products suitable for Valentine’s Day, Easter, Thanksgiving, or any other event, perhaps you can change your listings titles then, too?

It’s possible to spend more time surfing eBay in the name of research than it is actually listing your own items.  But it is time well spent, as it will educate you in how to get the best out of your own listings.  The whole of eBay is a school in how not to do things, and how to list your items to get the best return for your investment.  If you’re sinking your hard earned money into stock to resell, you need to be as sure as you can be that you will get a good return from it.

And the difference between success and failure, as I have learned, can literally be no more than a couple of letters.

The Complete, No BS, No Fluff Guide To Making A Fortune On eBay