Listing in 2 categories experience

[ricarmic]

In my never ending "experiments" I (re)try stuff to see if it helps sales.

Many of you will recall an earlier thread about upgrades and the cost and relative (lack of) value depending on who you ask.

During some recent experiments of my own, a by product of an experiment provides pretty good evidence that listing in two categories does sell more items sometimes. 

Now the only question is why?

Remember, I sell stamps, on .COM. Much of my material has sensible multiple categories, for example a package of 100 different Tunisia stamps makes sense to be in the "Tunisia" category as well as the "lots and collections" category in Africa.

The takeaway for me is that probably the first category wasn't as good a choice as the 2nd added category. To test this, I'll have to someday run some experiments to confirm what really made it better is just adding the more appropriate category 2nd by testing the sale quickness in one category only listed items in each of the 2 categories. Having said this my poor old brain is having enough trouble trying to keep track of experimental results, and my stuff tends to move slowly so that would be a long term experiment.

Anyway, the real moral of the story is to keep experimenting..... 

[rosscd57]

If an item is listed in two categories and sells - is it possible to find out which category it was in when it sold?

[ricarmic]

Sadly I do not know of a way to tell which category the buyer found the item in, aside from asking them.

Many years ago I did try asking buyers how they found my item and the short version is it was scary how little the buyers knew about how ebay worked and almost none of them had any idea how they found my item, let alone what category it was in.

I don't know if it would be different now, I suspect probably not a lot....

[momcqueen]

It's possible that there simply is no metric available for it. ebay will know which categories it was listed in but I doubt that they actively monitor what category a buyer might have been browsing when they found it. In fact, I doubt most buyers browse anyway. I never do. I use search to narrow results and long ago realized that even trying to filter via the categories at left would not yield satisfactory results because many items I sought were not categorized logically by their sellers.

I use two categories for a few product lines that straddle sortation and my only caution is that if you ever wanted to drop one of the two categories, the act of doing so seems to wipe clean all Item Specifics for your existing listing. That's a pain point to me.