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Developer Impact: Recent Sales and Best Match

Posted by Laurel Kline in Business News & Product News
Friday, Sep.05.2008, 7:32 PM PT

Here's another great reason to list in multi-quantity!

A fixed priced item's best match ranking will also be based on the number of recent sales that an individual listing has had.

Best Match Overview

Best Match is the default sort option on the eBay site. It evaluates each listing individually based on different factors. Listings are then sorted by their best match score.

Note that the factors used to evaluate listings can vary by category. The factors used can include (but are not limited to):

• Relevance of the title and category
• Total price
• Seller DSRs
• Ending time
• Recent sales

Conditional Best Match Overview

Conditional Best Match is a feature that allows us to sort different formats based on different criteria and then intermingle the results

Why? The criteria to evaluate a fixed price listing needs to be different from the criteria to evaluate an auction listing based on the fundamental differences between the two formats. For example:

• Time Ending:
  Fixed Price: A good fixed price item should sell immediately, not when it is about to end
  Auction: All auction items with at least one bid and reserve met sell once there is no time left
• Price:
  Fixed Price: The final selling price of a fixed price listing is determined by the seller
  Auction: The final selling price of an auction listing is determined by the buyers/bidders

Sort Criteria per Format

• Fixed Price sort
  Includes (but is not limited to) relevance of the title and category, total price (price plus shipping), the listing's recent sales and seller DSRs
• Auction sort
  Mainly sorted by Time ending, relevancy, and seller DSRs (but is not limited to these factors).

Recent Sales Overview

Recent Sales measures the number of sales an individual listing has had recently. This is one of the many factors used in Best Match sorting. The recent sales factor is most evident for multi-quantity listings.

Why recent sales?

• A purchase from a buyer is a great way to measure satisfaction
• The search experience is cleaner for buyers when there are not duplicate listings.

Note that multi-quantity listings are not possible and not rational for all categories, so the weight given to recent sales as a factor will vary from one category to another as appropriate.

Success strategy for sellers

• For items that should be listed in fixed price (for example, lots of inventory, seller knows the price, listing may need to be on site for longer than 7/10 days), sellers should list in multi-quantity (for the same low insertion fee 35 cents) for long duration
• The more sales you have per listing, the greater the opportunity for better visibility and standing apart from the competition

Note that the recent sales score for a listing is carried over to the first relisted item only, as illustrated here:

Developer Impact

You probably already support relist this way:

• If single-item listing has ended and it has not sold, automatically relist the item and get the relist credit.

To support this feature we suggest:

• Single-item listings: Keep single-item listings the same
• Multi-quantity listings: If the listing has ended and ANY quantity remains (and the item has not been relisted before), automatically relist. You will not get a relist credit, but your recent sales score will carry over.

You probably already support revise this way:

• If a listing has more than 12 hours remaining, allow revise.
• If a listing has fewer than 12 hours remaining, do not allow revise.

To support this feature we suggest:

• Regardless of time remaining, allow revise of price and quantity.

The eBay policy on revisions will be updated to allow this kind of revision. Also, the API will be updated to no longer block revision in this time frame.

Release date for Recent Sales is targeted for mid-September.