Should you Advertise FREE Shipping in your eBay listing titles?

Happy Friday!

It’s time for our weekly Reader’s Question post.

Today I want to talk about listing titles and specifically what kind of information you want to include in them. In general terms, your product keywords are THE MOST important part of your listing title. As I covered in my eBay SEO post, you can easily get keywords to use in your listing titles using the SEO function in Terapeak.

But what about other information like FREE Shipping? Should you include that in your listing titles?

This is exactly what Max asked me in his recent email:

Hello Andrew,

Thanks a lot for sharing all the information on your blog.

I have been selling professionally on eBay for the past 18 months or so, as an extension to our physical shop and own website. All the listings contain the words “free post” at the end and I wonder if this is wise?

What do you think of adding “free postage” in the title of listings of eBay? Is there any evidence as to the good it does? And does it still matter as nowadays most listings are offering free postage as default?

If the evidence is not there to prove it works, I would happily use the extra characters to enhance the title with more keywords.

Thanks for your advice.

Max

Hi Max,

Thanks for your email.

The short answer is – NO, I don’t think it is worth including FREE Shipping/FREE POST in your listing titles. As you say – the vast majority of eBay listings offer free shipping by default, especially listings on the first page of search results so customers are already used to the fact that most sellers offer free shipping.

Even more importantly – eBay clearly shows which listings offer free shipping with the Free Postage text right below the price for sellers who are NOT Top Rated Sellers and offer free shipping:

In my opinion this is actually more visible than if you write free shipping at the end of your listing title. Most people browse through search results by looking at gallery images, not by reading the actual listing title text.

And sellers whose listings qualify for FAST & FREE, will get that FAST & FREE logo right next to the price too, which means there’s two clear and prominent signs that free shipping is offered with this item.

It gets even better with sellers who are top rated as then those listings also show eBay Premium Service logo for each qualified listing + it can also qualify for FAST & FREE too, which means that there are THREE signs/indicators in the search results to say that this seller offers free shipping:

I think this is very noticeable and means there’s no point in advertising free shipping in the listing title itself.

You should use the listing title to describe your product and use as many related keywords as possible to increase your listing’s search rankings.

The sub-title is the place where you could put this information, if you choose to. But again – I don’t think it will make a huge difference as the reality is that you can’t measure such small changes on eBay effectively as there are so many different things that can affect your conversion rates.

The sub-title is a great place to put additional information about your product’s features and benefits though! You can talk about the best features, that materials the product is made of or compatibility and other important things you have no space to put within the main listing title.

A quick tip on formatting sub-titles – you have probably noticed how many sellers use this symbol to separate each “bullet Point” in sub-titles – ✔

How do you get that symbol?

You can simply Copy & Paste it from eBay directly and paste it in the sub-title when you create your listing – it should come up. This is a great way to separate text into blocks within your sub-title to make it easier to read plus it draws a bit of extra attention to your listing too.

So to sum it up – leave your main listing title space for your keywords! eBay shows clearly which listings offer FREE Shipping so you don’t have to advertise it in the main title. If you want, you can put this information in the sub-title, along with the most important features and benefits of your product.

Ok, that’s it for today’s short post. Remember, if you want your question to be featured in future Reader’s Question blog posts, all you have to do is contact me via my help desk here, and I will personally get back to you within 24 hours, Monday – Friday, even if your question isn’t selected for the blog.

Have a great weekend everyone! 🙂

Andrew