One of the key things to remember about sales is that we first need to find a pool of people that have an interest in our product and a the means to purchase it before we can hope to make a sale. There are only a finite amount of people interested in your item, and the more narrow the niche or interest of the item you are selling, the smaller that pool of potential buyers will be.
As resellers, we should be paying attention to our pool of potential buyers. This aspect can sometimes be forgotten about when we list items on popular marketplace sites, as we often expect EBay, Poshmark, Amazon or another platform to funnel traffic to us (which of course, they do), so we don’t feel that we need to worry about driving traffic to our items.
Poshmark is a big exception here, because sellers there tend to take more ownership over their traffic, and take more ownership over their marketing. As a result we see a thriving Poshmark community on Instagram, Pinterest and other social networks, filled with sellers sharing items they have recently listed and getting tons of traffic as a result. But on other eCommerce sites, there’s not as much focus on this.
Our job then as we master the world of reselling is to figure out how to analyze the pool of candidates that our store is speaking to, and how to increase that pool and drive more traffic to our listings.
So how do we do that? First, let’s understand what metrics we need to look at when we want to focus on driving traffic.
Key KPIs to Understand About Traffic
For you digital marketers or Shopify store owners out there, you’ll already be very familiar with the KPIs you need to review while driving traffic, so feel free to skip to the next heading. But for the rest of us, here are some key concepts in digital marketing that are extremely beneficial to understand for your reselling business.
- Impressions. This is the number of times your listing was seen by someone. If someone saw your listing after they searched, but scrolled past it, you would still have an impression.
- Clicks. The number of times someone clicked the listing. This can also be called ‘Page views’ or ‘Listing views’. This means someone actually looked at the item page.
- Click-Through Rate. This is the percentage of total impressions that resulted in a click. It is calculated by dividing clicks by impressions for a given item, and tells us how many people who saw your listing decided to click in to it.
- Conversions. In the digital advertising world, a ‘conversion’ could be a number of different actions, depending on what we’re trying to achieve. E.g. a conversion could be an email list sign up, if that’s our goal. As resellers, our conversions are usually sales.
- Conversion Rate. The percentage of clicks that led to a conversion (or sale). This is calculated by dividing the conversion count by the clicks.
If you’ve ever worked in retail, these KPIs may seem familiar. They are the same numbers that are tracked by brick-and-mortar stores. Impressions could be considered a rough estimate of how many people see the storefront or walk by it in a given time period. Clicks, in the retail world, is similar to the number of people who walked into the store. And conversions online is no different than conversions in a store, where people take an item to the register and pay for it.
Our job is to increase impressions, click-through rate, and conversion rate.
How to Improve the Number of Impressions
Since the impressions are the number of ‘views’ we get for our listings, finding ways to increase them will directly give us a larger pool of potential buyers who have shown some level of interest in our product (e.g. they’ve searched for something that resulted in our item appearing in the results).
We do this by figuring out how to get our listings in front of more people.
The trick here is to focus intently on keywords. What are people searching for when they find our items? How can we get our items to show up for more variations of searches on our selling platform?
By learning what searches are relevant to our items, we can analyze whether we have included those terms in our listings or not. For example, if we are selling “The Da Vinci Code” by Dan Brown, perhaps our listing title was “The Da Vinci Code Hardcover Book – Like New”. What’s missing here? The author name! People who search for “Dan Brown books” won’t see our listing.
We need to think about the different ways that people are searching for items such as ours, and make sure that we include those search terms as keywords in our listing titles, descriptions, and meta data. This will lead to more matches, and as a result, more impressions.
How to Improve Click-Through Rate for Your Listings
Once we have focused on increasing our impressions, we then turn to increasing our click-through rate.
The click-through rate of our listing tells us the number of people who saw our listing in search results or while browsing and actually decided to click it. This is extremely powerful information. If we figure out how to increase the click-through rate, then we are sending a larger number of people from our impressions pool further down the path to buying from us.
This is all about the titles and images of our listing.
Having great images does not help to drive impressions, because by the time someone sees the image, an impression will already be counted. But images are probably the most important element in driving a click to your listing.
Focus on improving your product photography. We’ll discuss tips for that in separate content over time, but if we were to give one major thing to focus on right away for your photos – use good lighting. Poorly lit photos do not catch attention, and would lead to people being more likely to scroll straight past your listing.
Titles are also important here. The user wants to know that the item you are selling is actually what they are looking for. It goes further than that though. You can optimize titles to make them more enticing than other items that are the exact same. Taking the “Da Vinci Code” example again – you won’t be the only listing for that book, so writing a title that matches exactly what the customer is looking for isn’t enough, because there are many matches on the results page. Taking it further would be figuring out how to make your title look better and catch the eye quicker.
The answer here is not to write your title all in caps so as to grab attention. You need to make it look better, not worse, than the competition. Focus on grammar and the ordering of the elements in the title. Front load the title with the most important words.
For example, “The Da Vinci Code (2003) by Dan Brown, Hardcover Book, New” is a better title than “Book by Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code, Hardcover, New (2003)”, because firstly it is better English, but also because the most important words are at the start of the title (“The Da Vinci Code”).
I should note here that the price you set for your item has a huge impact on click-through rate. People will be less likely to click if you don’t have a price that is fair and competitive. But assuming that you have priced correctly, optimizing images and product titles are the next most important things to help to drive clicks, and therefore increase your click-through rate.
How to Improve Conversion Rates
Now that you have increased the number of views your listing gets, and the percentage of those views that leads to a click to your listing, we now need to figure out how to increase the chance that those people will buy the item.
Increasing the conversion rate helps us to make sure that when someone has shown interest in our item by clicking to view it, they are more likely to actually proceed with a purchase.
This is all about the listing page.
When someone lands on the item page, we need to give them a reason to proceed further. This is done by presenting them with a great offering. Every element of the listing page contributes to that offering, but some are more important than others.
Your main image has already been optimized during the previous step, but your secondary images now become important in driving a conversion. When someone lands on the listing page, they may want to see more pictures of the item. Lifestyle or modeled pictures are great to have as secondary images here (or if you used them as the primary image, then a flat-lay, hanging or product photography style shot is good as a secondary image).
The product description also moves to center-stage now. To close the sale, it’s important to have all the information that the buyer needs in the description on the listing page. You can also take the opportunity to use some sales psychology here, using words and phrases that drive social proof (e.g. “Best Seller”), scarcity (e.g. “Limited Stock”), or likability (e.g. “10% of all sales go to charity”). Make sure to write an excellent description, and make it look professional.
In addition to the secondary images, description, and any other information fields in the listing (such as material, color, size etc.), you also need to focus on policies in the listing, such as shipping and return policies, which can help to close the deal by increasing trust and comfort with the buyer.
Focusing On These Optimizations Will Greatly Benefit Your Business
Aside from the obvious benefit of increasing your sales, focusing on optimizing impressions, click-through rates and conversion rates will also lead to you being ranked higher in the search results of your marketplace of choice. This is because the search algorithms on every marketplace site have the goal of delivering accurate and relevant listings to users. By improving your click-through and conversion rates, you are telling the algorithms that your items are highly relevant and people tend to make a purchase when they have seen the listing. As a result, those algorithms will start to push you further up the list.
I hope you found some value in thinking more about the stages of the buying journey, from finding your items, to clicking, and then viewing them in more detail. Optimizing for impressions, click-through and conversions will have a huge impact on your sales.
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How have you optimized your listings in your reselling business? Do you have any other tips? Comment below to let us know!
