eBay Best Match: How It Works
BusinessIf you’re an eBay member in the UK, you’ve probably already noticed that the searches you do now display results in the order of Best Match. But be careful, because eBay’s Best Match is being installed on other eBay country sites.
The previous default, for many years, was for search results to be presented in the sequence with the shortest time remaining in the auction.
However, the term Best Match sounds fair enough: it’s probably a comfortable term if you’re the searcher. How kind of eBay to give me a list of auctions to look at, starting with the “best match” at the top!
However, if you are an eBay seller, you now have a real problem.
Before Best Match, I knew eBay’s search engine was simple and straightforward. If the words typed by the search engine appeared in the title of your auction, your auction would be included in the list of search results. Okay, the order of this list defaults to the time left in the auction.
But at least he knew where he was with eBay’s keyword search engine. Assuming someone searched for the right keywords and his auction only had a short time left, he knew he would show up at the top of the search results, even if it was only for a short period of time.
Now, with the Best Match app to search results, you have no idea where your auction will appear in the first place. And second, you don’t know if you’ll EVER appear in the first pages of results.
At this point, you might be thinking that it would be a good idea to understand how you get to Best Match.
I agree. It may be a good idea but, like many good ideas, it’s not as simple as it seems.
Best Match is made up of a combination of elements. While eBay will tell you what those items are, they won’t tell you the weight they apply to each item.
It appears that Best Match is made up of demand factors, listing factors, and seller performance factors. Let’s look at each of these in turn…
The demand factors appear to be based on eBay’s calculation of such things as historical buyer behavior on eBay for similar searches.
Listing factors include listing format, keywords used, price, time left on auction
Seller Performance Factor is based on a measure called Detailed Seller Rating. The DSR is a seller evaluation, and the better DSR sellers have, the better it is for Best Match. A good DSR required sellers to have, for example, a high percentage of satisfied buyers and high ratings for shipping and handling.
For most sellers, the only way to analyze how Best Match impacts their auctions is to do some research.