(This is part two of Hannah Rampton’s post on eBay tools. Make sure you didn’t miss part one).
BayEstimator
BayEstimator is the most popular tool within the eBay Research Labs. It is very useful for those interested in creating effective, clear, search-friendly titles. Soon after launch, this tool was deactivated for a few weeks because it was so useful!
To use BayEstimator, you simply type in your item title, using all of your keywords, and the tool estimates potential traffic and relevancy of your terms on eBay. It then displays the results using a green circle that is sized to determine the ‘BayEstimate’, which is defined as “a rough measure of success”. The larger the circle, the higher the success rating.
The tool does not yet handle plurals, synonyms etc because they would make the tool and the interface even more complex. Every keyword is treated as unique, so please keep this in mind.
I tested out Bay Estimator by using it to research ‘reptile vivarium’. You can see below that I have searched for ‘Reptile Dragon Vivarium Enclosure’.
The availability column displays a typical item count for this search on eBay.
I can see that ‘vivarium’ has been assigned a much better success rate. However, I can see a good number of ‘enclosures’, so it would be worth be adding this into the title too. This way I can harness the most successful keyword (vivarium) along with the more popular choice (enclosure).
There is also a ‘modify item title’ column, so you can alter this a few times until you find something that contains all the information you need.
Better still, once you have generated all the keywords, you can then click on a keyword for more information. In this example I clicked on ‘vivarium’:
BayEstimator is now showing me that, in relation to ‘vivarium’, ‘reptile’ is more popular than ‘dragon’. It also generates other options such as additional keywords related to my item. As you can see, the second suggestion is ‘sliding’, which would suggest that many people searching for ‘vivarium’ add ‘sliding doors’ to further refine their search. If my product has sliding doors I may want to consider adding this into the title or subtitle.
If you click on the listed keywords, they will be added to your existing ones. You can continue doing this until you can see the stats for every keyword that you are considering, then filter out what you no longer need and rebuild your title at the top of the page.
The final column simply displays the categories that purchasers typically buy from, in relation to your keyword.
This tool is an estimator – please keep this in mind. It can offer great insight, and certainly help you create a much more effective title, but it is not the same as accessing live data. Note also that the tool does not support eBay Motors.
RepEx
RepEx stands for ‘Reputation Extractor Visualisation Prototypes’. This is a very simple tool — you just enter the username of an eBay user and it will display the last 90 days of feedback activity. You can generate multiple graphs, such as Volume Sparkline, Feedback Stats, Binary Sparkline, Volume Stars (round), Binary Stars (round), and Long Tail (all).
Hyades
Another simple tool, Hyades helps you learn about clusters of items — it groups items together and allows you to search within each cluster. This is fun for browsing but it can also give you a better view of your competition. Below I have searched for ‘Ed Hardy’ and I can clearly see the total number of items online, along with the number per cluster for each area containing ‘Ed Hardy’.
Emosi Sosial
Emosi Sosial means ‘social and emotional’ in Indonesian. All this tool does is to capture the emotions behind community feedback. A fun-looking legend is on the left and it simply displays the feedback for the user you request, along with emoticons. This tool enables real time querying, although only a subset of feedback data is obtained.
Color Search
Quite simply, this tool allows you to select a colour and then searches eBay items to match it. It is best for finding clothing and soft furnishings. It’s a great concept, but the demo works on a pre-cached set of images and not on live listings. Effectiveness must therefore depend on how frequently the listings are cached.
I hope these blog posts have given you some guidance for your eBay success. The tools have certainly helped me when using eBay stores. Whether you are clearing out your garage at home, or opening an eBay store, targeting the right keywords and categories can make a huge difference. Good luck!