One reason why your listing don't show

[iart]

We have a foreign poster listed at $25.

eBay gives us ‘recommendations’ on price.

They recommend $13.56 with free shipping (for this low price, we’d just throw it away).

How do the people who program the bots come up with this price? By keywording it to ‘Movies Original Poster Foreign’. Yup. That's it. I'm sure someone thought this was a brilliant idea.

So, I search: Movies Original Poster Foreign

SOLD prices range from about $14 to $132. The average SOLD price is around $30. So, they took the absolute LOW END without have any practical knowledge about the item.

The 8 posters they show as comparable have NOTHING in common with our poster. Like mixing apples with Bigfoot.

Why is this an issue? Because eBay will bury this poster until Hades freezes over. That’s why. The only way it will sell is if someone stumbles upon it with specific key words. One year so far and counting...

[luckythewinner]

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@iart wrote:

Why is this an issue? Because eBay will bury this poster until Hades freezes over. That’s why. The only way it will sell is if someone stumbles upon it with specific key words. One year so far and counting...

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If you give us the item number, we can tell you whether your poster is "buried" or not.

And just curious -

How else would a buyer find your poster besides searching with keywords?

For example, the Original International Movie Posters category  has 137,000 listings. Surely you are not expecting buyers to browse them all and find yours?

[katzrul15]

The Hippo one or the Japanese Super hero one?  I search for both with limited key words for each one and found them both easily.

You have some really neat posters.  

Have you thought about ending the listing and doing a "Sell Similar" or Re-List, either one with same title words but move them around?

Take the price up 10%, put it on sale for 5-7% off.  We moved some stuff recently with a Spring Sales Promo - someone on here (sorry, don't remember, but should because we used their idea) shared they often raise their price a little and then put it on "sale" for about the same amount.  We sold several that way that had "sat" with little love/looks since November, but had watchers.  E-bay sends those watchers an email that says, "hey, it's now on sale".  No idea if a watcher bought it or what, but created sales, so Yay!

[chapeau-noir]

Having it priced according to eBay's suggestions doesn't determine visibility, it determines what eBay *thinks* may help salability.  Since pretty much everything which sold in a certain category may be averaged to come up with this suggested range, it may or many not be applicable to what you're selling and is frequently way off.  Far as I know, good SEO and use of IS's is how items get found - as for being sold, well, that depends on a lot of things that may have little to do with eBay's pricing suggestions. 

What I would do is tinker with the listing.

[iart]

I think you misread my post.

I'm not the one who expects buyers to find the item with those keywords. eBay is.

And, I'm sure you've noticed, keyword search isn't a keyword search anymore. It now pulls up all kinds of things - many unrelated to the item.

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@luckythewinner wrote:

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@iart wrote:

Why is this an issue? Because eBay will bury this poster until Hades freezes over. That’s why. The only way it will sell is if someone stumbles upon it with specific key words. One year so far and counting...

---

If you give us the item number, we can tell you whether your poster is "buried" or not.

And just curious -

How else would a buyer find your poster besides searching with keywords?

For example, the Original International Movie Posters category  has 137,000 listings. Surely you are not expecting buyers to browse them all and find yours?

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[iart]

Yeah, the problem is we have about 200 posters up. Along with over 3000 other items.

Dealing with them on an individual basis is not impossible, but very time consuming and takes away from all the other work we have to do in here.

And thank you for liking our posters. Many are rare, some one-of-a-kind, and impossible to find comparables for.

[katzrul15]

You're welcome - love the Mao one....lol

Maybe just do a couple that have watchers (there are no minimums on the sale promo thingee) and see if it generates any interest/sales?  If yes, might be worth some time and effort.  BTW - I did that promo thingee really fast -  was surprised as had not done one in a long time.  

Unfortunately, at any given time, every Seller on here thinks their inventory is invisible.  My week was a couple weeks back.  It got better.  No idea "exactly" why, but it did improve.  (at least when I am "tweaking" I THINK I am actually doing something to offset the evil e-Bay bot Gods....AS IF!  😄)

[luckythewinner]

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@iart wrote:

I think you misread my post.

I'm not the one who expects buyers to find the item with those keywords. eBay is.

And, I'm sure you've noticed, keyword search isn't a keyword search anymore. It now pulls up all kinds of things - many unrelated to the item.

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Then I guess I still don't understand your post. 

You said that "eBay will bury this poster". 

So for arguments's sake let's pretend that eBay has not "buried" your poster.

How exactly would you expect a buyer to find it among the 137,000 others? 

Please give us the item number, and the search method that you think a buyer should be able to use to find it. 

[my-cottage-books-and-antiques]

I think you may be assuming something that isn't actually happening. For a variety of reasons, ebay is using a VERY general term to arrive at an average price for such posters. For many newer commodity items, ebay is much more granular, because it has more useful data for that stuff. BUT

Just because ebay uses that general term to arrive at a price suggestion, does NOT mean ebay expects buyers to use that very general term when searching for a specific poster. If a buyer really is looking for that exact poster, your title keywords (and perhaps to some extent your item specifics) will impact the search results far more than that general term.

I don't know much about the poster market, and haven't looked at your listings, but I sell mostly vintage and used stuff, the kind of stuff ebay doesn't usually have good price recommendations for. My stuff (as I would guess is true of many posters as well) is long tail. Some of it very long tail. Which generally means I need to wait till the right person comes along before selling it. And yeah, that can sometimes take a long time. A couple ways to try to increase the sales velocity: run a sale, send offers to watchers, and use promoted listings. Also, if you have a Facebook business page, or use other social media for your business, you can try to drive buyers to your stuff from off ebay as well. (And, with if you use the ebay partner network for that, you can sell your items without having to pay FVFs)

[coolections]

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@iart wrote:

eBay will bury this poster until Hades freezes over. That’s why. The only way it will sell is if someone stumbles upon it with specific key words. One year so far and counting...

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NO one could ever possibly find your poster without using keywords when Ebay had millions upon millions listed. Ebay does NOT hide your poster.