Point 1:
It surprises me EBay recommends to say "NEW" when many other places in Ebay Univerity etc it clearly says putting "NEW" in the title is not a good idea in CAPS because it makes the title difficult to read. Are people searching by typing "New abcd item" when searching on ebay? I seldom would do that.
Point 3 & 4:
Amazon search for instance clearly discourages putting too many keywords in the title, instead recommends to focus on 1 or 2 keyword expressions and put the rest in the item description and back-end keywords. Now I understand this is not Amazon and there are no back-end keywords in Ebay, the title in Ebay is limited to 80 characters, so anything that doesn't fit into the Title needs to go either in Subtitle (extra pay) or in the description.
Needless to say there is even less clarity of how Ebay search works but I never thought using subtitles is effective for search results and Ebay is not clear about it either other than how much it charges me if I use the subtitle.
Off topic: In my opinion, subtitle should be turned into back-end keyword field and that should be free with every listing to allow optimize the listing and avoid keyword stuffing in the Ebay listing titles which look pretty awful to read at times.
Which takes me to the next issue: keyword stuffing. How much is too much. For instance, the title example here in the same help page from Ebay:
2019 Women's Sneakers Sports Gym Fitness Casual Trainers Casual Running Shoes
The title is just hard to read. I am skipping now the issue of the seller putting the year 2019 in front of anything else in that title but I guess it's due to lack of any brand name.
What I am not clear if there is any best-practice for the number of synonyms used and the number of descriptive expressions.
How much is too much? Would using instead.. Sports Gym Fitness Casual Trainers Sneakers Shoes ..make the title less readable and be better for search results? Or it doesn't matter?
How about Sports Gym Fitness Casual Fitness Women's Sneakers Shoes
Or Women's Sports Sneakers Gym Shoes Fitness Trainers Casual Fitness Shoes
Of course it's always best to do A/B testing to see what works best. What I have issue with regards to the new Best Match search in ebay is that it's not even clear what the best practice would be.
The title below is such a bad example because it tells nothing about properties of the shoe, the type, material, color etc.. to name a few. Now, it's the seller who decided to list the cheap no-name product in the most effective way that targets customer looking to purchase a single-use $20 shoe. And that is fine. But the issue I have is how unimaginative EBay is when it comes to even provide any recommendations, because I don't think there is any argument that this specific listing is not a good example to look at and it's a bad advice in general for new sellers.
Point 5:
How does "best match" work when it comes to keywords used in description? (That is: In particular keywords used in the description that didn't fit in the listing title)
Does best match algorithm consider those keywords? Or it only considers them if they are in the title, category, item specifics etc..
The the classic ebay search (when best-match is turned off" seems show mixed results. Sometimes the search shows only listings where the title contains the search terms and sometimes the search results include even listings where my search terms are not in the title. That is the case regardless whether I turn the "best-match" on or off.
Point 7:
The titles allowed on Amazon are definitively longer and with 80 characters on EBay, but Amazon recently started to reduce the number of characters in some categories and strongly recommends sellers to maintain maximum 80 character limit in the titles because of readability issues of long titles on mobile devices.
Ebay says to avoid using "markers" in the title. Am I required to avoid the marker altogether or avoid using the marker purely for "decoration". For instance, Amazon clearly states, title must not contain special characters for decoration (such as ~ ! * $ ? _ ~ { } # < > | * ; ^ ¬ ¦), however, I am allowed for instance to use " | " as a divider between expressions.
For Amazon the recommendation is pretty clear to focus on 1 or 2 keyword expressions and separate them for readability with " | " mark and use the rest to describe the item features such as model, material, colour (unless variation) etc..
It's not clear if Ebay has any issues with sellers using " - " or " | " characters in the titles to make them humanly readable?
