Fire Up Online Sales with these Crucial Product Listing Principles

"Make sure your product listings are optimized."

"You have to optimize your product listings if you want people to find them."

"Optimization is the key to high-performing product listings."

Everywhere you look, you’ll find advice like this. But while it’s certainly true – your listings do need to be optimized – it’s not particularly helpful if you don’t know what optimizing a listing means. In short, it involves providing marketplaces and shopping engines with complete, thorough and useful product information for each and every available field of data. Let's take a closer look at what that means and how you can apply this basic principle to turn bland product listings into hot selling tools.

Understanding complete product data.

Do you know what information to include in your product’s title? Do you know which information should come first? These kinds of questions apply to other information areas, too, such as the Product Description.

Titles are not all created equal for different products. Clothing tends to tell you the gender right after the brand. Electronic equipment jumps from brand name to the model number because so many people search for specific models. But for the most part you want your product title to look like this:

BRAND + PRODUCT NAME + COLOR + STYLE + MATERIAL + SIZE + IMPORTANT FEATURES

Choosing product categories carefully.

When picking categories, you want to get as specific – and deep – as possible. Here’s the problem: there are often multiple options that seem like they could fit your product. How do you pick?

It’s not an easy decision, and if the site you are using does not allow you to choose multiple categories on the same level (most don’t), your best course of action may be to engage in a bit of A/B testing. Take two similar products and choose different category paths, then see which one does better.

Getting creative with keywords.

The secret here is to start with the most obvious keywords and then start thinking outside the box. Let’s say you’re selling sunglasses. In addition to “sunglasses,” you might want to add words like “shades,” “specs,” “cheaters,” “goggles,” and even “pair of glasses.”

This is just a quick, partial list taken from a thesaurus and is by no means exhaustive. The goal should be to come up with terms that people might be searching for. And the more the merrier. Neglecting a keyword or two can cost you sales.

Exhaustively detailing product features.

You can further define your product by telling the site about specific features. Imagine you’re selling a sound bar. How many channels does it have? Is it wireless? How many watts? Is it Energy Star Certified? How big is it? These are all terms that people may use when searching for a sound bar, and obviously you can extrapolate them to whatever features apply to your specific product or products.

Thinking about how data will be filtered.

Are you selling something new? Used? Refurbished? What does it cost? Will shipping be free?

Specific sites also incorporate unique filters. Amazon allows people to view only Amazon Prime products. eBay lets you define products by age group, which is particularly useful when selling items aimed at kids.

Thinking about how customers might refine their search further is important, because if their initial search has way too many results, they may wish to narrow their focus. The more focused a search is, the more likely your product is to show up – if your product data is as detailed as it should be.

Keeping inventory up-to-date.

Product data can change over time, and the specific requirements of marketplaces change, too. When this happens, you need to update your product listing to reflect these changes.

If you do not do this, your listing is likely to fall quickly in the rankings. In some cases, your account may even be penalized if listings include data that isn’t true anymore.

One of the most important things to keep up-to-date is your inventory information. Maintaining high inventory levels is best, because sites tend to preference sellers who can actually provide customers with products. But if your inventory dips, you need to make that clear in your product data as well, because few things are worse than promising something you can’t deliver. In fact, you can be banned from selling on Amazon if you sell a product that you no longer have in stock.

This isn’t easy when you are managing products listed on multiple shopping channels, but you can use GoDataFeed’s GoOrderSync to automatically synchronize marketplace orders to your platform, including everything from inventory level, order status, tracking numbers, and shipping info.

So what does good product data look like?

It’s extensive. It’s detailed. It’s specific. It follows the rules of the particular marketplace or shopping engine you’re submitting to. It tries to predict what customers will be searching for. It’s accurate. And it’s regularly updated.

If you’ve done this -- and done it right -- you know that optimizing every single product listing for every single shopping engine and marketplace can be time-consuming, expensive and tedious.

That’s why our software at GoDataFeed syndicates your product information everywhere. The strongest possible product listings with the least amount of work for you.

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