Ebay Changes: Fixed Price & Best Match

So back in July of 2009, Ebay announced they were changing their Best Match algorithms later that year (as if we understood how they worked to begin with). These changes went into effect in late 2009, and affected how "Best Match" would be scored in certain of categories. In these categories "time recently listed" would now count more than the "listing performance score". The listing performance score is basically how well an item is selling in relation to how often it's viewed - a sort of popularity contest that places best selling items above poorly selling items.

These changes are spelled out by Ebay on their "Best Match Tips" help section, and mentioned prominently in this excellent Brewsnews article, "An Analysis of the New eBay Pricing Change by a Seller In-the-Trenches"

Beginning late September 2009 eBay changed the Best Match criteria for Art, Antiques, Coins & Paper Money, Collectibles, Dolls & Bears, Pottery & Glass, Toys & Hobbies, Stamps, Sports Mem, Cards & Fan Shop, and Entertainment Memorabilia. In order ”To keep the freshest inventory on top and surface a broader selection, the main sort factor for Fixed Price listings in these categories will be recency of listing instead of listing performance score“

Conventional wisdom said it was always better to use a Good Til Canceled (GTC) listing over a 30 day listing because only the GTC format carried over the accumulated "search score" - sometimes over many months. In fact, according to my own tests, the single most important factor was "recent sales". I noticed that as soon as an item sold, it would often be followed by several other sales. This was due to the sudden search ranking boost from the first sale. Immediately following a sale, a keyword search would often find that item in the top five "best search" placement, and often remain there for several days. Some items with many sales (20 or more) would remain in the top ten for weeks at a time - even if there had been no sales at all for several weeks. I also noticed that items with more "watchers" and identical sales histories would usually rank a few places higher.


Fast-forward to March 2010 where we all all awaiting the impending 3/30/2010 fee and store changes. Over the last month or so, I have converted all of my old store inventory format items into Fixed Price. If ever there was a time to re-evaluate how items should be listed, it would surely be now.

But I had a bit of a dilemma. According to this article, and ebay's tip sheet, if I went with GTC listings, I'd lose the search boost my collectibles category gets for having new listings. Apparently when a GTC item relists, it's not seen as a "new" listing. So clearly it would be better to use Fixed Price 30-day and just create an automated rule that re-lists them indefinitely. This would give the added advantage of being able to cancel re-lists easily (GTC's need to be canceled individually - yikes!).

But the devil is in the details.

When a 30 day fixed price listing is renewed for another 30 days, it's completely relisted - all original sales data is cleaned out, and it's assigned a new ebay item ID#. Ouch! Huge problem since I use an offline auction management system that tracks by ID#.

So having little other choice, I converted my 500 or so listing to Fixed Price GTC and just crossed my fingers my Best Match rankings wouldn't suffer too much. After all, my items are competitively priced, ship for free, and I am a Powerseller/Top-Rated-Seller. So maybe 3 outta 4 will be okay?

After running this configuration for a month all I can say is that I am very pleasantly surprised. My best selling items are definitely ranking highly in Best Match search rankings - and they are working almost exactly as they always have. Despite what ebay has said about changed how they rank items last October ('09), recent sales and most watched items are clearly getting the search karma.

I have many items 20+ days from renewal - so they are NOT seen as newly listed OR ending shortly - that are outranking fixed price items that were listed today AND auction items that are ending within 4 hours. The only thing they have going for them is 5 or more sales over the last 2 weeks. I also have several high ranking (top 10) items with no sales for 2 weeks, but several sales 3 and 4 weeks ago.

So what does it all mean? Simple - GTC fixed price is still the way to go - even in the Collectible's category. Regardless of what ebay is saying, they are, in fact, still ranking successful GTC items higher than the "fresh inventory" they claim to be giving special treatment.