Black Friday Goes Analog and Why Optimized Listings Help eBay Sellers Capitalize on Unexpected Trends

Optiseller used its online data tools and analytics to look at Black Friday data examining how eBay sellers performed on what is one of the most important shopping periods of the year for many.

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The somewhat surprising results showed that analog mediums like vinyl records and books had the greatest increase in visitors, with CDs and Art not far behind.

“We monitored the performance of the categories on eBay over the recent Black Friday period, and the data revealed some quite astonishing results. It seems that people have decided to switch off from their screens, as the big winners this year were vinyl records and books, with CDs and Art also seeing a big increase.”

Richard Falconer, COO at Optiseller

Falconer believes this trend may be due to a shift in people working more from home and looking at different ways to switch off and relax. Also, as more demographic groups joined online shopping due to the Covid-19 pandemic, searching patterns may have changed as well.

Optimized Listings Help Capitilize on Surprise Trends

While sales of vinyl records in the UK saw a surge in 2020 already, with almost one in five albums purchased being vinyl, sometimes these kinds of trends can easily go unnoticed by eBay sellers still stuck with old, not optimized listings.

eBay has been updating its platform to give shoppers a better buying experience. But this also requires sellers to optimize their listings to fully gain the advantage of the improvements eBay has made.

One of the best optimization tricks is to use Item Specifics to meet eBay’s latest standards.

Unfortunately, for one reason or another, many sellers still keep ignoring Item Specifics and often end up missing out on opportunities, which often also leads to declining overall sales for them.

“According to eBay, listings from business sellers with at least 6 Item Specifics have 47% more impressions per listing than listings with less than 6 Item Specifics,” said Richard Falconer in our Q&A from June of this year.

Meanwhile, new sellers often are more inclined to follow eBay’s best practices for creating listings today, attracting sales as their items surface more frequently in search results. SEO on eBay is as important for eBay sellers as SEO is important websites trying to rank high in Google or Bing search results.

There is never a bad time to optimize listings, and with many days left in the holiday season, now is as good of a time as any other. Sellers shouldn’t wait to update their listings until the next unusual trend comes along for which they have items listed on eBay. By then it may be too late to capitalize on the opportunity.

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