Not sure if any of you have come across this, but I’ve noticed something kind of quirky. This is related to eBay titles and how this can affect your auction a lot. FYI, this is from some very basic/casual observations so far, nothing definite.
I had a few popular MTG sealed box items up for auction, such as the Ultimate Masters, Battlebond, and a few others. These boxes typically sell at very stable prices and with good volume for about $390, $175, respectively. My auctions on these boxes ended at around $330, $135, etc, which seems way below the market value. In percentage terms, it was 15%, 23% off of the “market” value. I was moving 3 boxes in each of the listings, and usually that’s not such a large quantity to skew the final per box value that much. I recently did some quick search for my active items and found it that it was very difficult to locate them. I think typing in BOX vs BOXES made a very noticeable difference. I have not done a thorough research on this, but was just basing off my first impression. I was concerned because it seemed like the prices on these boxes sold for was really low.
I think my Pokemon listings were somewhat affected too. My Japanese CP6 20th anniversary booster boxes listing sold for $240 and $275 for the two 3-box listings, when the average sale prices are about $125/box right now. My boxes averaged a paltry $80 and $90/box, which is 36% and 28% off. This is a HUGE variance.
Again, these were not LARGE monetary losses in the grand scheme of things, but it is frustrating when it seems that this little bit in the wording of my listing could’ve had such a large impact.
Anyhow, if anyone else noticed these, then please share with me and the community. Luckily, the loss is only in the hundreds of dollars so far, but it is unfortunate.
Will you be listing something similar but using “box” instead of “boxes” this time? Would be curious to see how they perform to verify that this is the case (which I think it might be).
Auctions almost always always go for less then the going market value for an item, I’m not sure that your title had anything to do with that. But even if you are concerned your title is lacking for whatever reason, you could always pay the small extra fee to have your listing promoted to the front for higher traffic volume and more visibility.
in my experience, you are slightly right. because these are popular items and i’m only selling 3, not, say 10-15 boxes, the impact shouldn’t have been this dramatic.
i have more boxes that will go on sale probably later this week. i will for sure write the titles differently. it really hit me when i tried to search for my boxes and they didn’t appear using the word BOX, only when using BOXES. that was when it hit me that the search algorithm might have something to do with it.
This isn’t all the details in the search algorithm, but it should be enough to get a most exposure.
Put the broadest term of the category your in first and the less searched keywords last. My listings always start with Pokémon card and I end with set and condition. I could probably experiment more with this, but I’ve been doing my formula the way I have for so long I don’t. My total order is category > variance > card name > set > condition. You don’t have to copy me, but you should have an idea of who you’re targeting. Whether that be a high end client who values condition more which would put your condition ranking higher, or a general buyer more which would put your set more towards the front. If I was going to change my order I would probably put the condition ahead of the set, but I know most of my competition does that so I purposely do the opposite.
As I eluded to before if everyone is doing the same thing understand why and break the rules to your advantage. I put my condition listing last even though I would be better off in the rankings by putting my set last and moving up my condition ranking. This is one of my secrets when it comes to getting higher premiums on my cards. Sometimes other people’s listings don’t show up just because of some obscure search methods people use. Keep in mind if your copying me you’re not doing this right, you have to be original yourself compared to what others are doing.
Keep your titles as consistent as possible or as varied as possible. If you vary up how you list your items you’ll get different customers who search differently and hopefully they search your store. I prefer to keep my style the same, this is to target the individuals who only use the search bar. There are a lot of people who never search individual stores for cards. I know this because a lot of my sold listings from the same people come from promoted listings which don’t show in the store searches. So I prioritize same style listings instead of variant styles.
Your terms should be things people search, I remember someone in the past was using TCG. I told them use card instead. This is what you’re talking about. People rarely search for multiple boxes, but they do search for booster box.
You can use your description to your advantage, but don’t put too much emphasis on this. I find this one doesn’t do much, but you can keyword stuff the description. Basically if you’re selling an entire set of cards you don’t have the room to put all the names of the cards in the title. You could throw them into the description and eBay will rank your listing for that. It’s not a huge thing so I prefer a better description instead of a keyword stuffed description.
A lot of people miss the broad terms in their titles. If your listing is just 1st edition charizard 4/102 for example you’re listing isn’t going to beat someone who adds Pokémon card in the title. EBay’s search prioritizes the broadest term and then wants you to scale down so their best match is more accurate. Essentially the computers don’t know that charizard 4/102 is a Pokémon card so you have to tell it.
Those are some of the better tips I can give. I don’t suspect all of them to be entirely accurate because my test methods are flawed and I don’t have all the access to eBay’s search algorithm. Good luck.
Love your post but question one thing. I did a test 20 years ago with ebirdman, who always puts the word Pokémon 1st and me last, and I got more views than he did when staggering times with otherwise like items.
I figured that “Pokémon” wouldn’t attract them amongst a page full of all Pokémon but “PSA 10” may hook em on a page with ungraded, psa 9s and 8s and ungraded.
Hope I haven’t been wrong all these years lol.
They changed the algorithm a while ago. The issue is when you read what they say and compare test to what works it’s often different. It says start broad and end specific, testing might result differently. They also say they don’t omit listings but I can assure you not all listings get shown with every relevant search.
So you could very well be right Gary. You could also be hitting upon a market of weird searchers like I talk about in the paragraph after. It could also be that your location is a higher volume search location than ed’s - location of items has a role. Your profile might have more authority than ed’s. The amount of items you have in the same category would play a role. It’s hard to tell what’s going on, but you can test it yourself with multiples of the same item key worded
differently.
Either way putting in strong keywords will result in the most volume of searches. The other tricks are minimal compared to that.
I think you’re thinking way too far into this. Seems like the typical going rate at auction is about $370-380 per ultimate masters box but some going as low as $350. By putting 3 in one listing you automatically chop off a HUGE part of your buyer pool because most people just don’t have that kind of extra money lying around. They are picking those boxes up one at a time whenever they get a chance. Also, 99.9% of magic players are just that, players. The investor portion of the magic community is INSANELY small so most buyers are only going to want one box anyways.
Another issue I see is you only pictured one box. Your listing would have brought more initial eye appeal by picturing all 3 boxes.
Lastly, you have to remember that this is magic and Ultimate masters may as well have came out 4 years ago with how fast they have been releasing new product. Everyone has eyes on modern horizons and m20 now and could care less about ultimate masters (hint as to why the prices haven’t moved at all in the last two months). You would have had much better results just putting it up for BIN OBO and undercutting the lowest single box BIN price by about 5%. While yes, the boxes are worth more than they auctioned for, the attention and demand just isn’t in that product right now so auctioning is risky.
$965 for the 3 UMA boxes divided up and sold individually for $390 each minus fees and an estimated $10 shipping each would net them $22.90 not including cost of packaging materials or time and trips to the post office.
$410 for BB sold in the same manner would net a flipper $16.75 minus cost of time and materials.
i’m not saying the buyers are flippers. i’m simply saying that the price discrepancy is pretty significant. the UMA boxes had the smallest percentage decrease, but if you look at the other examples, the percentage was pretty dramatic. i was wondering if the photos could also contribute to it, which I think would as well.
I understand, I wasn’t implying that they are flippers either but 99% of things that go through auction on Ebay never sell cheap enough to where someone can flip the item and make a large enough profit that makes flipping worth it. That’s the price floor which every popular item has. Unfortunately your items just sold right at that floor.
And I’m not saying that the title was completely dismissed from blame but I think that the main issue was trying to sell multiple boxes in an auction format (where most people are only looking to purchase one box) and only picturing one of the three boxes.
I would just highly recommend that you list those types of items at BIN before trying to auction them. Also, I typically sell my MTG products on Facebook. The community there is fairly healthy, I can link you to some of the pages if you like. Most are good about having references for buying and selling and they all use PayPal so you’d save 10% at least.
Your title and keywords probably did make a difference, but I also think that you listing boxes in lots of three had a bigger effect on your end price. I would say most people looking for a booster box are usually only looking for one.
The buyers that are looking for three are probably buyers with resale in mind, they want to get a bulk deal so they can make margins so will bid less on the auction for three hoping to get a deal.
You also limit your buyer pool the higher the value of the items your selling gets, more people can afford one box vs three, more bidders should equate to an end price closer to ‘market’.
Only way to settle it is to see how the next batch performs otherwise everything’s speculation - if you really want to get scientific list some like you did before and list the others with a more optimized search function (disclaimer - only do this if it’s a burning curiosity that you want to figure out, lol.)
There are way too many outside variables to make a conclusion from this. Listing practices obviously matter but you could list the exact same item, the exact same way 5 times and it would sell for different prices each time.
Ofc if we want to get nitty gritty you’ll want to repeat this about 30 times and assume no confounding variables, but the most practical way is to change the listing titles and see what happens and go by your gut. I was just saying that if you want to be more precise you can run it like an experiment — I wasn’t going for completeness/precision since I think doing it once is enough to point in the right direction in this case.
I see where you’re coming from I just strongly disagree with that providing any sort of evidence toward one way or the other. At least not with sale price. I think the easiest way would be to list the items at BIN and check view counts over specific periods of time. With auctions you can have 7 people bidding but if the top two are only willing to go to $50 then it will only sell for $50. Or you can have the same item with only two bidders but both will pay $100.
That makes sense, and I actually really like the idea of checking view counts over time for BIN. Would be much a more reliable gauge than a 7-day auction for a lot of reasons.