Ep 270 || Using the eBay Listing Quality Report

[podcast_team]

This week we rejoin seller Ashley Moulder of Millennial Mouse on eBay tells us how she uses the Quality Listing Report to increase her sales. eBay’s Chuck Van Pelt has news of 12 seller-requested feature enhancements that are going live as we speak.

Episode Links:
2023 eBay Ads Holiday Guide
Ashley Moulder’s eBay Store
Listing Quality Report
Recurring Links:
eBay for Business Podcast
eBay Seller Spotlight Podcast
eBay for Business Podcast Listener Survey
eBay Seller News Announcements
eBay for Business Facebook
Community Chat with eBay Staff
eBay Seller Center
eBay Help
eBay Local Seller Events
Seller Hub
eBay Events

Brian: I'm Brian.

Griff: I'm Griff and this is the eBay For Business Podcast. Your source for the information and hopefully the inspiration you need to help you start, manage and grow your business successfully on the world's most powerful marketplace. And this is episode 270 and you all know that we record a week ahead in advance. So by the time you hear this, you're finished with Thanksgiving. But for us it's just beginning 'cause it's the Wednesday before the Thursday. Brian, are you ready?

Brian: Not yet, but close. Close and helping hands are coming in. When I left the house, my brother was peeling apples.

Griff: Well that's a start.

Brian: It is good for you. Many hands make light work as the saying goes.

Griff: Absolutely.

Brian: And how about you?

Griff: I don't know yet. I have many options and I haven't decided which one I'm gonna take yet.

Brian: And in a new location this year?

Griff: Or there's also Swanson's Turkey dinners.

Brian: No, not that. Well I hope all of our listeners had a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend and I hope you figure out like what your choice is.

Griff: Yeah, I like having all these options, so we'll see.

Brian: Cool.

Griff: Oh, hey, before we get to you asking me who the guests are, one little quick addition to what we were talking about last week. You know, we had that question that we, uh, took from the Facebook group that was about Canadians who can use international shipping.

Brian: Yes.

Griff: So again, I, I know we said it in the piece, but that presumes that you have access to one of the service providers that will then take your items and ship them to their warehouse on the other side of the border. 'cause that has to be where they actually start their shipping. And somebody wrote in and said, Hey, you know, not all of us have that. So if I misled anyone to believe that this was available to every Canadian seller, the caveat is that you have to have access to, in a practical way, that service that these third companies provide by taking your items and then you either drop them off at their center, I suppose maybe some people ship. Yeah, I don't know the different services, but the upshot is that it's only available if you can get your items located as their start point for shipping within the United States. I thought that was a given, but I just wanted to reiterate.

Brian: A good call out and a good point. Well, Griff, who's our guest this week?

Griff: Well Brian in lieu of No, you got questions. We're going to have two guests this week.

Brian: Oh great. Are we really outta questions?

Griff: We are, but this is not unusual for this time of year, Brian. It's the holiday season and sellers are really busy. I think the last thing on their mind is sending us a question, but they'll return soon I'm sure. So instead of questions for this week, we have our first guest, he's based in Portland. He's on our Seller Advocacy Team. His name is Chuck Van Pelt. He's been on the show before and Chuck has some important updates and news about seller tools and features that have been enhanced and added based on seller feedback. Sellers have been requesting you. So you're gonna want to listen to that. And then I'm gonna talk with eBay seller, Ashley Moulder, who's returning to the podcast to talk about the benefits and uses of the quality listing report. But before we get to Chuck, have you found any news this week that's related to eBay?

Brian: Well Griff, as you know, this time of year is usually not newsworthy as we all focus on last minute listings and sales. But we do have one bit of news. eBay released this year's 2023 holiday guide, vice president and general manager of eBay US Adam Ireland posted an announcement on Seller News in Community outlining the guide and his takes on some of the shopping trends for this year. And although we've just come off cyber week with giving Tuesday, which would be today the day of this episode's release, there are two more important shopping dates to keep in mind. December 3rd, which is the first Sunday in December, first Sunday is historically one of the biggest shopping days of the year and December 11th, otherwise known as Green Monday is considered the last safe day for falling inside the windows for pre 25th shipping. So it's typically a rush day for last minute shoppers.

Griff: You know, and it's important, keep those two dates in mind when you're planning promotions or maybe discount sales or sales events because that's gonna be high traffic days on eBay. And we know from survey results that we've talked about in previous episode with Julie Klein that one of the big concerns with uh, shoppers this year is price. That's their top line concern followed directly by quality. Those are gonna be good days for planning your sales events.

Brian: And if you think about price, you know, if you think, oh, I'll just tag on an extra shipping option that they can be expedited or get it in two days if they pay more, if price is really the driving factor for the buyer, they may not be interested in that on the 15th or the 16th of the month.

Griff: Yeah. But if they're real procrastinators and they want something and they know they gotta get it quick, they're gonna want that option.

Brian: Yes.

Griff: So maybe you don't add it to the price of the item, but you just add it as a shipping option. And either for that listing or if you're using policies, change the policy to one that has more than one option. So say you got a free option, that's maybe it's Ground Advantage USPS Ground Advantage, but for those buyers that need something quickly, you can give them the option for a paid shipping option like Express USPS or FedEx. Or UPS

Brian: Always good to give the buyers an option.

Griff: Yeah, I see that all the time when I'm shopping on eBay and off as well. And if I need it real quick, I'm gonna be willing to pay for it. So I'll see you back on the outro side. Right now we're gonna meet two guests. I'll let you get back to cleaning your yard and , make sure you wash your hands, take off your gloves, wash your hands, and we'll be ready for the last segment in a few minutes.

Brian: Sounds good.

Griff: Sellers are never at a loss for suggestions that they would like to see for the tools they use to list and sell on eBay. And we have team members whose job actually is to listen to that feedback and get it back to the product team that designs and enhances the tools that you use. And today with us is somebody who's been on the podcast before, he's on the Seller Advocacy Team and Seller Experience Product. Please welcome Chuck Van Pelt back to the show. Hello Chuck.

Chuck: Hi Griff.

Griff: So Chuck, I hear you've got some news.

Chuck: I do, I do. You know, part of my job as a seller advocate is to listen to our sellers, give them a seat at the table with our Product Team. And we've been hearing from sellers that one of the things that's important to them is to speed up a lot of the repetitive actions that they do every day on eBay. We listen to the feedback and we've actually rolled out 10 improvements to our advanced listing tool. The idea is to increase efficiency, improve listing quality, and some of these are actually already out and the rest should roll out through the end of the year.

Griff: Oh, this is fantastic news. Now I sell on eBay all the time. I think a lot of our audience also sell using the same tool. But can you just give us a little insight to somebody who might not be using it? What is the Advanced Listing Tool?

Chuck: We have a lot of different ways to list on eBay mobile and various ways through the web and and our API. The Advanced Listing Tool though is it's our web-based listing tool that's for more experienced sellers. It's really the go-to listing method for sellers who want to move quickly but also maybe have a little more familiarity with all the different fields that they have to complete to list an item. New sellers may find that they're defaulted to our Quick Listing Tool, which is a little more kind of an elementary interface, but they can switch to the Advanced Listing Tool. They click on the button in the upper right corner of the page of the quick listing page and it says Switch to business tool. So sellers that have stores sellers who are using seller hub already, they're automatically opted into the Advanced Listing Tool.

Griff: Now a lot of these sellers, they're not even aware that there is a Quick Listing Tool for new sellers.

Chuck: Exactly, yeah. Sometimes a seller just has the same experience because of the kind of seller they are and they're not even aware of the changes. But if you are on that Quick Listing Tool, I definitely would advise you to give the Advanced Tool a shot.

Griff: Just from my own experience in the past, sometimes big changes need some documentation and a little bit of training. Are these big changes? Is there gonna be a learning curve for these improvements?

Chuck: No, not at all. It's really important to point out that these improvements, they came right from conversations with sellers about what slows them down. We specifically looked at the kinds of things that sellers do over and over as they are listing. And most of the improvements are actually kinda small. But we specifically chose things that would have the biggest impact based on how frequently sellers do them every day. And the best part is that most of these changes are actually live now. You want to hear what's been improved.

Griff: I'm all ears!

Chuck: Well there's quite a few to go through here. The first two improvements are related to changing the category of your listings. Sellers who changed the category of a listing after they had entered their item specifics in the past would lose all their work. So you would go up and make that category change and a lot of the things you put in item specifics would go away. Very frustrating obviously to lose work starting now when you change a listing to a new product category, as long as it's still under the same level one category, the tool will retain those aspects that are relevant to both of the categories and it'll just get rid of the irrelevant ones. For example, let's say you're listing in clothing a shirt, you're within the clothing, shoes and accessories level one category. But if you move from casual shirts to dress shirts in the past, that would've wiped out your work in item specifics and now it will retain most of the information in there.

Griff: I've actually had this happen to me several times.

Chuck: I know it's really frustrating to spend time doing something and then make a change somewhere else and see your work reverted. And you know, eBay to be fair, is a very complex listing platform. We've looked at all these little things that have an impact on sellers and tried to change them.

Griff: That's pretty cool.

Chuck: Yeah. Now this next one is also related to categories. When changing the category of a listing, sellers were forced to start from the top of the category tree and navigate down even if the desired category is right next to the current one in the hierarchy. And this could be three to six levels deep going forward, sellers are now going to be able to navigate directly across to another leaf category without going back to the top.

Griff: That's great news!

Chuck: Yeah, again, it's one of these things where why didn't it work this way before? But we're hearing the voices of sellers, we're doing these things ourselves and we're learning that little changes can have an impact on tasks that people do over and over and over all day.

Griff: So we've got two improvements. They were under categories is the third one about categories as well?

Chuck: The next three are actually about shipping. Sellers have frequently told us that it was difficult to understand how to add free shipping to their listing. Now we recently added a new module to the shipping section of the listing screen and we made that checkbox for free shipping highly visible. It allows you to easily enable free shipping on your primary shipping service.

Griff: That's great. What about is this apply to sellers who have policies are using shipping policies?

Chuck: That is a great question and I'm glad you're using business policies Griff. Business policies are still going to work the same way they always have. So if you've made a policy on what you've enabled free shipping, it'll just keep working the same way it always has. But if you're not using business policies, you'll see that shipping module for your primary shipping method show up on the screen and right there is that checkbox.

Griff: Ah, that's perfect.

Chuck: Now the next one is also related to shipping. Now that USPS First Class Parcel has changed to USPS Ground Advantage, many sellers have pointed out that we no longer have a way for them to specify the First Class Letter shipping method as a way to ship. And that was kind of a casualty of that transition. But First Class Letter, I'm not sure if you're familiar, but it's when you basically, when you use a stamp to mail, like a letter rate envelope, something small and and flat. Well First Class Letter is coming back to the Advanced Listing Tool. So be on the lookout for that.

Griff: I had no idea it was gone.

Chuck: Yeah, I think a lot of our sellers who are in niche categories that sell small flat things are, we're definitely impacted by that.

Griff: Oh, I see. Yeah.

Chuck: The third shipping item is um, when you do a sell similar from one of your own listings, eBay makes a direct copy of the listing except we used to leave out the shipping method on the copy.

Griff: I know that was so frustrating.

Chuck: I know. It's just another thing that you have to go in and redo each time you do a sell similar. But in most situations now we're gonna copy all over the shipping method and save you that extra bit of time.

Griff: Fantastic. I love this.

Chuck: We've got a few more here. We've been very busy. There's five more here that are all, I kind of call this rounding the edges of the listing tool. We're looking for all the little friction points, all the little things that people say if I do this 10, 20, 50 times a day, it's really eating into my time. And you know, to be fair in the spirit of transparency, you could call some of these bugs that we've resolved, but most are really refinements to the tool that are intended to speed up listing for sellers.

Griff: Okay Hit us.

Chuck: Alright. We receive reports of the listing preview freezing. So the listing preview is when you're building your listing in the tool and you can see like a preview version of it. And people have said, you know, there have been times when I made changes and it freezes, I don't see my changes reflected in the preview. We've actually reproduced that and determined the cause and we released a fix. So now the preview should show you exactly the customizations that you make.

Chuck: Excellent.

Griff: The next one, grift, you ever add video to your listings?

Chuck: Yeah, when I sell, for example, uh, wristwatches, I like to show that they're running. So I include a video of the actual watch working.

Chuck: Well eBay does allow you to add video to any listing and our sellers have told us that they love this capability. That said, some sellers tell us that when they upload a video and there's a problem with the upload, we don't do a very good job of communicating the cause for the issue. For example, they might see the same error message if the video upload timed out or if the video was rejected for not following the guidelines and there would not be an easy way for them to understand what had happened. Starting now, we will provide an appropriate error message that'll clearly tell you if your video can or can't be published and why. So you can make adjustments and I would definitely recommend taking the time to try uploading a video. The tool is amazing and it really gives buyers a lot of insight about the listing.

Griff: Yeah, this is excellent. But for those of you in miscount, we're about to embark on number eight. I feel like it could be like David Letterman's old countdown.

Chuck: Is. I know. Yeah, the top 10 for sure. So while this next one we've heard from sellers that the photos sometimes upload slowly or they upload in the wrong order or they just fail to upload with like an ambiguous error message. There's definitely room for improvement on that. So we're working on three things to improve the experience. We're working on providing better error messaging, kind of like we did for video, faster image compression and faster preloading of the images before the seller attempts to edit them. So these are all areas that we found were causing delays or misunderstandings or not providing good feedback to the user when they were able to take an action.

Brian: I occasionally will run into that and it usually fixes itself when I try again. But yeah, I've seen this

Chuck: Griff, on this next one I wanted to ask you this question. Are you familiar with the difference between a selling similar and selling one like this?

Griff: I think so, but fill us in, would you?

Chuck: I will, I will. So sell similar is when you make a copy of one of your own items and you say, I wanna sell one like this. What we call sell one like this, that feature is when you make a copy of another listing, someone else's listing that is out on the site, it doesn't bring everything over, but it basically allows a seller to clone any listing and reuse the title category and item specific. Until recently, if you attempted to clone a listing from another eBay region, like let's say Canada, the listing tool would attempt to list the item for you in Canada. Now if your account is in the US then it would prompt you to log into the Canadian site. Not a very useful experience.

Griff: Yeah, I've had this happen.

Chuck: Yeah. Well a lot of our sellers use this flow, this specifically to sell one like this to list. Good news for them. Now any listing that you clone will automatically be configured to list on your own regional eBay site. So no more login prompts.

Griff: Oh, groovy.

Griff: Number 10. Do you use the custom description template tool at all where you can save descriptions for other listings?

Chuck: I have a long time ago when it was first launched, but I haven't used it recently. I thought it disappeared. Well,

Chuck: No, it's, it's still there and it's a great way to, if you list a lot of the same kind of item, like you list a lot of records or a lot of cameras, you could make your own description template and then pull that up whenever you're ready to list something. But sellers noticed that the description templates could be lost with no error message. If there was an issue when they saved them. So they go in, spend all this time to build this description template and then they would lose it and not have any kind of signal that they did, they would go back later. The template would just be gone. Obviously not a great experience. Now this failure is most often caused by the template being over the character limit, which again, maybe didn't do a good job of disclosing what that was. So we made two changes to fix this. So first we raised the character limit for the description templates to match the same character limit that we had on the, the main description field. Why they were different, I'm not sure, but now they're the same. So that should eliminate that problem. And then second, we show more descriptive message if the template fails to save. So basically it'll give sellers a chance to correct the issue. You know, anytime we find a potential for sellers to lose work, we're gonna prioritize fixing that. And this is one of those cases right there.

Griff: Perfect. So that's 10. Anything else you can add to this? I mean I know 10 is great.

Chuck: Uh, you know, I kinda wanted to do like a Steve Jobs style one more thing. But actually I have a couple more things that I can share.

Griff: And the audience goes wild ,

Chuck: Well here's a preview of something else we have in the works. Now this is a little hard to convey, but it's one of the usability improvements that I'm the most excited about. Now, have you ever noticed in the items specifics that some attributes only show up after you selected another attribute? So for example, you would have to pick size type before the size menu would show up in there.

Griff: Yes.

Chuck: This behavior would, you know, a lot of sellers would sometimes miss those additional attributes or they would say, why is there no size on here? And they wouldn't understand that there is a, a dependency set up there. We've completely revamped this and it's not launched yet, but it's coming soon. All the aspects will be shown from the start, even if they have dependencies on others. So they may be grayed out, but you will see everything there and it will all be very clearly marked as to what those dependencies are.

Griff: Again, I've seen this happen in the past, so yeah, this is good news.

Chuck: I'm hoping that'll be a big time saver and save a lot of people trouble and misunderstandings around our listings. So the next additional thing, we've had a lot of positive feedback on our AI powered descriptions and we rolled those out on the mobile apps. Well, the same description, generation capability is in the process of rolling out on the advanced listing tool. One click it'll quickly generate a description that you can edit to your liking. Or if you don't like it, you can just roll it back just like on the mobile app. It's a great way to get past that challenge of starting cold on a new description. Sometimes you're just like, I don't even know where to go, what the story is, I want to tell about this item. And it's a great way to kind of get past that writer's block. Yeah. Next time you list, give it a try.

Griff: That's not launched yet, it's in the works.

Chuck: Correct? Yeah, that one is, uh, is rolling out. It'll probably be what we call a ramp, which means that it will come out a little bit at a time. Some people will start to see it and we'll just make sure everything's going the way it should and then we'll roll it out for everyone.

Griff: So we have 10 that have been launched or in the process of being launched.

Chuck: I would say there is a spectrum here of some are launched and then some are in the process and some are a little bit towards the end of the year.

Griff: And then we had a preview of coming attractions with number 11 and 12.

Chuck: Exactly.

Griff: This is excellent. Well Chuck, do you have any final words for sellers?

Chuck: Yeah, yeah. It's important to understand that these changes came directly from feedback we received from sellers. And I'm talking to sellers all the time. And to them I'll say, keep the feedback coming. When you're using the listing tool, you may find issues or you may see an opportunity for improvement. What you should do is use the your feedback link in the upper right corner of the listing page and let us know. We read all of it and it really makes a difference. Be candid, don't hold back. We want to know what will make your listing experience better.

Griff: Sounds like a fair exchange. Chuck, I want to thank you so much. This is great news. I'm sure our sellers are gonna love this and hopefully we can have you back in a few months with more news.

Chuck: It has been my pleasure. Griff,

Griff: Chuck Van Pelt is with the Seller Advocacy Team and the Seller Experience Product larger team. And he is our advocate to bring your suggestions for new and improved features for selling on eBay to the team responsible for making and implementing those improvements.

Griff: Our guest this week has already been on the podcast, uh, several episodes ago, uh, to talk about listing myths with our friend Valerie Yee. Ashley Moulder is back to join us again. I'll remind you that she's the owner of Millennial Mouse, a homegrown online resale business that specializes in pre-owned and vintage clothing and fashion. Ashley takes great pride in being part of the lgbtqia plus community and ensures that she provides a wide selection of fashion, not only for everybody, but for every body. Ashley graduated from the Fashion Institute of Technology and to this day she can continually utilizes her degree in fashion merchandising management to help build and grow her business on eBay. Ashley opened her eBay store in 2018 as a way to expand her online fashion business and it quickly became her primary selling platform. And boy don't we love to know that she currently has over 2000 active listings across all of eBay fashion and clothing categories. Welcome back Ashley.

Ashley: Thank you for having me.

Griff: 2000 listings, these are one of a kind items, right?

Ashley: Yes, everything is unique. I might have a handful of multi quantity, but they're like less than 10 probably. But all unique, all thrifted, pre-owned items.

Griff: Have you ever imagined how long it took you to put 2000 items up?

Ashley: Uh, yeah I have .

Griff: What are you asking me?

Ashley: I think my time per item. So from start to end, taking in sourcing, listing, shipping, all of that. I spent about five minutes per item. So five minutes times 2000.

Griff: It's a lot of minutes. Yeah. Yeah, it's a, yeah, it' about 10,000 minutes.

Ashley: Something like that.

Griff: A small lifetime. Yeah. Well I want to thank you for coming back on. I know we had a great conversation earlier this year with Valerie Yee about listing myths and boy there are a lot of listing myths, . And for those of you who Ms. Ashley the first time, why don't you just introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what you do?

Ashley: I think you covered most of it in the intro .

Griff: . Oh good. So we could just skip that. ,

Ashley: I think the only thing I would talk about really is I do sell all thrifted and vintage fashion. So it's all pre-owned, all unique, all one of a kind. And because I still focus on volume instead of unique specialized like higher price items, I really focus on perfecting my processes in order to get to quicker at listing everything and maximizing my time spent on each item because I do have so many that I'm listing and I'm looking to move volume. So that's definitely one of the things I primarily focus on and I try and like excel at.

Griff: Well I have to admit I think you're good at it. 'cause if you're honest about your time estimation, I think five minutes per listing is actually pretty good.

Ashley: Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty And and that's like broken out based off like averages and stuff like that because I took it based off like how long does it take to source, how long does it take to list ship every time I'm touching the item, like the lifespan of the item. Sometimes it's only taking me actual listing of, it may be like a minute or so or something like that. But I wanted to look at the whole lifespan of the item, how long I'm touching it.

Griff: Since we had you on a listing episode, I wanted to bring you back to talk about another feature which has a kind of interesting recent past. It's called the Listing Quality Report. I think a lot of sellers, or at least a lot of people internally didn't think it was that big a deal. So someone decided they were gonna end the life of the listing report.

Ashley: I remember that. And everyone was like, where did it go? ?

Griff: Yeah. Well it's back. So, you use it, correct. You use the listing report?

Ashley: Yes. Yeah, I downloaded it about once a month, once every two months-ish. I'm not very like super strict on it, but that's kind of what my goal is.

Griff: When did you first start downloading and using it?

Ashley: I wanna say about a year and a half ago. I think it's been around that long, but my time is skewed sometimes in my brain. So I think it's been around for that long. It's been a while since I've been using it, let's put it that way. I, I can't really like put a hard mark on it.

Griff: You didn't start using it last month?

Ashley: No, no, no, no, no. I've been using it for quite some time.

Griff: Can you remind people how they find the listing quality report?

Ashley: It's under the performance tab in Seller Hub. It looks like a banner but it's not really a banner. Kind of at the top there'll be a button that says download listings. Quality report. Yeah. I believe it downloads in ACSV format. So you'll either have to import it into Excel or Google Sheets in order to view it.

Griff: How do you use it to improve your listings?

Ashley: It only gives you like your top kind of categories that you sell in and they're kind of broken down. And I remember when I first looked at that I was very surprised because it doesn't give you all the categories, it just gives you like your top ones. And I was very surprised of like what one of my, some of my categories were. I was like really? I sold that much there Really? Okay. . So yeah, I was definitely interested in that. I do like your newer tags items. It will tell you what is rejected by Google image shopping, which is nice. So you can check your pictures and stuff like that.

Griff: Yeah, that's important.

Ashley: So looking at the categories that it gives you, and I love that it gives you your rank in the category. Like where do you stand among other sellers? So it tells you that like you rank, you know, number a hundred versus all other sellers in this category and it's drilled down. So like men's used jeans is a big one for me. And so it'll tell me where I rank within men's used Jeans. That's one thing that I, I always find to be really kind of cool to look at because I wanna know and I wanna make sure that I'm doing the best I can and it, and I would love to be number one obviously, but I'm not there yet.

Griff: , is it explained how the ranking is calculated?

Ashley: It doesn't say exactly, but it does give you, I'm assuming that it's based off the all of the data and the factors that they show you within the report.

Griff: Oh I see. Yeah,

Ashley: You know, within the report they'll give you like your impressions, your click-through rate and your sales conversion and it'll rank you versus other sellers. But then as you go up to the one side of it, what it will show you is all the different metrics they're looking at and where you stand at that. So it's like your keywords, how many photos do you have, your handling time returns, what type of returns they are, do you offer 1430, stuff like that. And I'm assuming that it's taking all of those factors in to determine where you rank.

Griff: Yeah, it makes sense. I don't know if you have an exact example that you could provide of a listing where the listing quality report by following the recommendations or the, the data points within for a specific listing. Has that made a difference in the listing or the category that you noticed an increase in conversion?

Ashley: I wouldn't say individual listing standpoint. I don't really look at the individual. 'cause there is a portion where it gives you the individual listings in that category. I look at the top level stuff. I wanna look at the overall, because I do have so many listings. I have noticed. So for one, it said I had on average, I don't remember the exact number, it said I had on average about five keywords versus other sellers had eight keywords that were in the top 10%. So I started expanding my keywords and then I've noticed my rank go up within that category. Same thing with the number of pictures. It'll tell me that on average I use 5.5 pictures or something like that and the top 10% are using 7.5. So I started taking more photos, you know, even if I like try to find ways to take more detailed photos and stuff like that. So I have seen improvements in the categories that I've focused in for that. I wouldn't necessarily see it on like a individual listing level, but more at like a higher level.

Griff: Besides the ranking, do you notice an increase in your gross sales?

Ashley: Yes, for sure. For sure. Absolutely. Like whenever I go in and I start tweaking things and I start looking at the categories, I'll notice a, usually a spike within that category. I focused on that time. Yeah. So I'll try and focus on a category each time I look at the listings quality report and every time I do, I typically will see a spike in sales in that category.

Griff: The sellers on our platform who use a particular tool or feature or service a lot tend to have some ideas, opinions and feedback about what they'd like to see added, enhanced, changed or removed from a particular feature. I'm just wondering, Ashley, do you have any opinions that you'd like to state about what we could do to improve the listing quality report?

Ashley: Okay, so as one who likes a lot of data, I do appreciate the amount of data that it provides you. But to the general user, it's a lot of information and I think it's overwhelming. So I think a lot of people avoid it because it is so overwhelming and they're not knowing what to focus on. Like for example, it's telling me who in my category has 14, 30 day or 60 day returns. My store is all 30 day returns. I don't care about that. I'm not looking at that. You know, my handling time is one business day 'cause I wanna remain top rated. So I don't need to look at that. So like that's great, but to me, I don't need it because it's not a factor. So I think if it could be paired down a little bit to provide more top line information, that would be good because so a general user who's never looked at this before, this report is extremely overwhelming.

Griff: Oh, I have never downloaded it. I should do this.

Ashley: Yeah, it's, it's gonna give you a lot of information.It also will, tell you where your stats are for it and then it will tell you what the top 10% of sellers in your category in that category does. And the bottom 10% of sellers in that category does.

Griff: The bottom 10%.

Ashley: It does show that. So you can definitely see, like I was looking at one that was like handling time. It's like one was like stated handling time for me was like, or actual handling time was like one day and then the top like 10%, it was like two or three days. I was like, what are you people doing? And then the bottom one was like five days. I was like, okay, we're doing better than them.

Griff: People do for better or worse or whether or not you can provide it. People do just off the, you know, right off their head expect things are gonna be shipped very quickly. It's just, they've been trained by, well certain marketplaces which shall be unnamed that we all know. When I was talking about you in our introduction. Uh, and it's mostly vintage clothing and fashion.

Ashley: Yeah. So I focus on denim and vintage clothing within fashion. I'll sell any fashion, but those are like what I focus on mainly. And I kind of like specialize in kind of.

Griff: Is there any aspect or category or subcategory in the fashion overall category that you avoid?

Ashley: Men's dress shirts, men's suits. Handbags, jewelry and shoes.

Griff: Why shoes for example?

Ashley: My inventory system is not set up to accommodate shoes. Really the way I store things and inventory them, it's really not set up to accommodate it. I will sell shoes occasionally, but also I hate shipping shoes.

Griff: . Oh you do? Why is that?

Ashley: I don't wanna have to pull out a box. I don't have to pull out tape. I don't wanna have to do all this to get it in. I don't wanna have to do any of that. So my inventory's already stored in poly mailers. It's already pre-bagged and clear poly mailers. I wanna just pull that out, pull in poly mailer, slop label in it and call it a day. Yeah, yeah. Especially 'cause I am moving volume. I need to make that as quick as possible. So if I'm taking time to put together a box, make sure it fits right, make sure that the weight's right. I will sell shoes. If I find shoes that are worth selling for me.

Griff: like there's a big profit in them.

Ashley: Yeah. Like you know, vintage stock Martens, you know, I just sold a pair. I sold two pairs of those this week. So that's why it's top of my mind. Those I have a great profit on. But if it's an everyday shoe, no I'm not gonna spend the time on.

Griff: So are you a one person operation then?

Ashley: Yes and no. I say yes 'cause I do do most of the work and I could do all of the work if I did want to. Um, I do have a business partner who, we have like a kind of a consignment deal who sources for me and sends me inventory. So I have that. And I also do have a virtual assistant. I have run my business by myself for sure for a while and I could if I needed to, but it's like, it just helps me a little bit along the way.

Griff: Because you mentioned the volume you do and I'm assuming that you list a certain number of items every day. How many items on average do you sell a day?

Ashley: Sell a day? It really depends on the week. I mean I have a sales dollar goal amounts for each day, but I would say on average I would sell probably about anywhere from I would say eight to 18 a day.

Griff: That's a lot.

Ashley: Yeah, it's kind of a wide range. Especially because I do offer a clearance option. So I have some of those low dollar clearance options, which will help raise that number. So it's not all high dollar sale. I could have a bunch of $5 sales in there, but it's moving stale inventory. That's all I care about.

Griff: My reason for asking wasn't so much about the gross merchandise value of all your sales is that it doesn't matter if it's $5 or a hundred dollars, you still have to do the work listing it. You still have to do the work packing and shipping it and the work. Sourcing it and storing it.

Ashley: Yeah. And so I do all of that myself. If I am having a larger shipping day, my husband can help me. Yeah. At times. But for the most part he doesn't. And I list about a hundred new items a week.

Griff: That's a lot. I'm desperately trying to get to a hundred and it's a lot of work.

Ashley: It's a lot of work. There was one point where I was at 150 a week, I just only recently slowed down a little bit because with my business partnership and stuff like that, we're doing the consignment thing. I've been working on doing the listings myself more because my VA isn't as great with vintage. Whereas when I was doing more modern stuff, she was doing the listing aspect for me. So I was able to pound 'em out really fast. I was doing 150, 200 a week at that time.

Griff: Yikes.

Ashley: But my profit margin's better now. I can't really complain about that.

Griff: Oh, so good. Well that's we we wanted, we wanna know you're doing well. That's important . Well Ashley, I want to thank you so much for all you do and for taking part in seller week here.

Ashley: Thank you for having me. It's, it's been an experience. It's been great here. Honestly being here has put a lot into perspective. I think we a lot of times get into our little bubble of what eBay is. And I think as like pre-owned splitting sellers that a lot of times start on other platforms and they come here, I don't really think they understand the behemoth that eBay is. But actually being here, seeing all these people, seeing a full campus of offices really puts that into perspective. And it's like a wake up call sometimes 'cause you're like, wow, this is big.

Griff: Yeah, I can imagine how that would be. I suppose I still take it for granted 'cause I've been coming to this campus for years. But yeah, it takes a lot of really talented, dedicated phone people to keep this platform going along with the sellers without there would be no platform. There's nothing on the shelves.

Ashley: Like a stark dichotomy of me working out of my home in my office at my home versus a whole campus here. But it all still goes together .

Griff: That's exactly right. Well thanks again Ashley and best of luck coming up to the holiday season. Hope it's a good one for selling for you.

Ashley: Thank you. Hopefully.

Griff: Ashley Moulder is the owner of Millennial Mouse. That's a homegrown online resale business. We'll put the links to Ashley's store in the transcript summary overview for this episode.

Brian: Well Griff that was a really good episode with Ashley.

Griff: When you think about the history of the listing report, it almost died.

Brian: That's right. It did almost die.

Griff: I think there was enough of a pushback by sellers and some of us within the company that the team responsible said, whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait a minute. We'll rethink this.

Brian: Valuable info. It's a good example of eBay listening to the seller community.

Griff: Well, we always do. I think people, um, they think we don't, but we do.

Brian: Yep. Well, if you wanna be listened to, call us on (888) 723-4630.

Griff: You know that number (888) 723-4630. Quite frankly, you're not using it enough and I'm having second thoughts about keeping it available. So prove me wrong. Give us a call, (888) 723-4630.

Brian: And if you're not a call on the phone person, you can email us at podcast@ebay.com. That's podcast@ebay.com.

Griff: And now your favorite part of the show, we assume, your weekly Three Point Podcast ChecklistCheck the announcement board, especially this week for that holiday update at ebay.com/announcements for UpToDate Seller News every day.

Griff: Yeah. And if I didn't mention, I'll put a link in the show notes for where you can get directly to the holiday shopping guide. And number two, this is your last call for listing unlisted inventory for the holiday rush. Don't put it off. You could be missing out on more holiday sales and you'll kick yourself.If you do

Brian: Need to review anything in this episode, it's easy. Check the transcript for this and all episodes for follow up on what you've heard and to find the links we referenced during the episode.

Griff: And on our next episode, we'll visit eBay's Casey Yardley to talk about the importance of customer service.

Brian: We'd like to again thank our guests this week, eBay's Chuck Van Pelt at eBay's Seller Ashley Moulder.

Griff: We'd also like to give a plug to our sister podcast, the eBay Seller Spotlight with Georgea Mpampanis. The next episode releases on November 29th. That's a Wednesday. And it will feature seller Mayumi Roehm, who turned her love for pop culture collectibles into a career when she joined My-D Pins and Collectibles. Mayumi and Georgea will talk about the most sought after Disney pins, how she keeps an eye out for counterfeits, and what it's like attending collectible shows around the country.

Brian: You can find this in all past episodes of the eBay Seller Spotlight podcast by searching on your podcast app of choice for Seller Spotlight, or visiting the podcast page on eBay community at www.ebay.com/podcasts.

Griff: The eBay for Business Podcast is produced and distributed by Libsyn and podCast411. Thanks Brian.

Brian: Thanks Griff. Have a great Thanksgiving.

Griff: And you too.

[valueaddedresource]

@podcast_team  to Ashley's point about not needing some of the info and wishing there was a more top level condensed version of the listing quality report....eBay actually said they were going to do that, and provide the ability to pick which categories to see in the report, as part of the Fall 2021 seller update but it never happened.

Any chance this is still on the road map and if so, any timeframe?

https://www.ebay.com/sellercenter/resources/seller-updates/2021-fall/business

Listing Quality Report

Earlier this year, we launched the Listing Quality Report. This report is a downloadable document that provides you with analysis at listing and category level. It suggests specific actions you can take to optimize your listings and categories. You can use the report to help boost your views, impressions, and sales. It was designed with input from the seller community to make sure it matches the needs of your business.

To keep improving the report, we’ve made some updates.

This month, the Listing Quality Report will be available to download in three formats:

• A PDF “one-page summary”
• An Excel “full report” with one tab per category
• A CSV “raw data” file, to be exported for further analysis

In the past, you could see the analysis of your 10 categories with the most live listings. You’ll now be in control of which categories will show up in the report. You’ll also have the option to keep the existing analysis, using the top 10 categories with the most live listings.

[my-cottage-books-and-antiques]

@podcast_team  Thant's great news about videos in listings, and the decision by ebay to actually provide explanations when a video fails. Just two questions on this:

1. Will explanations be available for BOTH these scenarios?

A. Video hangs or otherwise fails to upload from PC to ebay?

B. Video uploads properly, but fails the review and is not approved?

2. We also have the ability to load a "store video" in the About Tab of our Stores. Will the explanations be available for this video as well?

[my-cottage-books-and-antiques]

@podcast_team 

Ashley said: "So for one, it said I had on average, I don't remember the exact number, it said I had on average about five keywords versus other sellers had eight keywords that were in the top 10%. So I started expanding my keywords and then I've noticed my rank go up within that category. Same thing with the number of pictures. It'll tell me that on average I use 5.5 pictures or something like that and the top 10% are using 7.5. So I started taking more photos, you know, even if I like try to find ways to take more detailed photos and stuff like that. So I have seen improvements in the categories that I've focused in for that. I wouldn't necessarily see it on like a individual listing level, but more at like a higher level.

Griff: Besides the ranking, do you notice an increase in your gross sales?

Ashley: Yes, for sure. For sure. Absolutely. Like whenever I go in and I start tweaking things and I start looking at the categories, I'll notice a, usually a spike within that category. I focused on that time."

Now, using photos as an example. I am an experienced seller. I have a pretty good idea of how many photos a particular item requires. So, let's say my average number of photos in a category is 4. But the Listing Quality Report says the top ten percent average 6 photos.

Now, it is pretty clear that if I add more photos to items in that category it will increase my rank in the Listing Quality Report. 

But doing things like pulling inventory and taking more photos is, obviously, extra work. I can really only justify that if ebay can confirm that adding those photos will bump up my rank in search placement (even if only marginally).

So, can we read the LQR that way?  In other words, in this case, the search algorithm wants to see at least 6 photos, and less than 6 lowers my search rank (even if only by a little, I know there are many. many factors beyond the number of photos)

[griffville]

@my-cottage-books-and-antiques
Extra photos alone will not "bump up" an item in Best Match. For Best Match, the key is photo quality, not quantity so having less than 6 photos won't impact your BM ranking. 

[my-cottage-books-and-antiques]

@griffville  Thanks Griff!

[podcast_team]

@my-cottage-books-and-antiques

Sorry, we don't have any insight as to actual error messages for failed video upload. If you find that one of your videos has not uploaded, let  us  know and include a copy of any messaging. 

[my-cottage-books-and-antiques]

@podcast_team  Oh, OK, thanks for getting back to me.

[maxi314]

It is good to see eBay examining the quality of listings.  I am only a buyer, but cracking down on sellers, usually very big (wholesaler), sellers, who insert the tag, "vintage" for brand new items - often clothing - most recently and specifically, berets - has become absurd.  Now if they used the tag "retro," there would not be a problem.  To state "vintage" when brand new, sure seems fraudulent. 

It is true that viewers of listings can skip them, but if an item is completely mis-tagged/mislabled, that is directly against eBay policy, and, in one instance this past week, the search results were flooded with these big wholesaler listings, pushing individual seller listings to the next page.  I think eBay sellers deserve better.