So you wanna understand Best Match...

[whoscloset]

A really good article (if somewhat long) that may help you to figure out how to rank higher in ebay's new default Best Match criteria.

http://www.auctioninsights.info/decoding-ebays-best-match.html

[coxengines]

Thanks Monique,

As always, with your generous and selfless dedication to our cause, you are an inspiration to us eBayers!

Xena

[whoscloset]

I've been testing certain words in the titles for some best match searches and there seems to be merit to the theory.

I would strongly recommend that everyone have a look at your reporting and find out what keyword search phrases are bringing customers to your listings BEFORE Best Match kicks in as the default. That way you can study what the impact is of various OTHER words in the title to your ranking on search pages.

[westernstargifts]

Great articles and information Monique. Thank you!!!!!!

If eBay includes location in their algorithms it looks like once again they are putting the American sellers first.

If you are a buyer, page 3 of the results might be a good place to look for bargains.

[recped]

If eBay includes location in their algorithms it looks like once again they are putting the American sellers first.

As they should for US buyers, pretty obvious that all other things being equal buying within your own country is normally better for a buyer.

Personally I'm not convinced that Best Match is such a big problem. If buyers don't find what they want with the Best Match as default they will change the default search to something else.

At the moment I think Ending Soonest is the default, that rarely works for me any better than Best Match.

[whoscloset]

I would STRONGLY recommend that you do some research on title keywords for your products based upon the above link. I played around with my water fountain titles and they have now gone from...

page 10 of the current default search by time, to

page 3 of the best match search which will be the default soon.

[snoopwiz]

Thanks again for the link Monique (wordy yes but, insightful) After having read it all, it has occurred to me that those listing "rare" items (usually from 1-5 different listed at any given time) really have no reason to be concerned about this upcoming best match default. Or am I missing something here?

[whoscloset]

http://labs.ebay.com/raghavgupta/demoto/to?

[dipmicro]

I have many listings that are unique on eBay (i.e. only I have it - but on some I start seeing some copy-cats after 2-3 weeks after introduction) and when the particular keyword is typed, only mine come up, so there is no issue with these.

I noticed that Best Match takes into account also the ending time of listings.

One more note to optimisation:

What happens when you list your GTC store listings in bulk with TurboLister? They will rank differently based on the time of the month (because as they aproach renewal, they will apear on first page for a while). I started speading my listings over month's time. Spreading one store listing per hour gives me 720 slots in 30 days.

Another optimisation I was thinking about was what to use for default store front: most expensive, least expensive, newly listed, ending soonest? After some thinking I came to conclusion that the best options are NewlyListed and Ending Soonest as defauls. Until recently I was using Newly Listed and just switched it to Ending Soonest. The reason is the buyer might be more likely to bid on soon ending listing (I know I would be).