Fashion sellers, here is to you. If you’re serious about making money selling on eBay, you have to make sure your products are searchable by size. It does sound pretty self-explanatory but you would be amazed by how many sellers don’t follow this simple rule.
At WebInterpret we help thousands of online retailers sell abroad and a fair chunk of them are selling clothes. It’s the UK fashion sellers in particular who seem to be quite successful abroad, especially now that the pound sterling is relatively week compared to other currencies. According to our data, UK fashion sellers succeed mainly in Germany, in the US and in Australia.
However, if you believe you can tap into the German market just by adding postage to Germany to your UK listings, you may be wrong. You have to remember that sizes are very different in continental Europe than they are in the UK and, to make matters worse, they are different from one European country to another.
With clothes, what’s generally known as the EU size will work for your buyers in Germany, Scandinavia and in Poland. Unfortunately, your average French shopper will probably return her order as too big – EU size 34 generally equals French size 36. Things get even worse in Italy where the same EU size 34 equals size 38… Monica Bellucci admits wearing Italian size 44 which, if it was the same as EU 44 could be a plus size but in reality converts to EU 40…
How can sellers cope with this mess? Many choose to provide all the possible compatible sizes in their eBay listings. This leads to listings which are cluttered, provide a poor buyer experience and – and that’s the most important point – are not searchable on eBay.
The above listing is a perfect example of an item that can’t be found by buyers who filter the search results by sizes. eBay’s selection of available sizes simply doesn’t allow you to choose a size called “US L – EU XL”. What’s more, the seller is still not on the safe side as far as returns are concerned – EU XL size will work for her German buyers but not for the French and Italian ones!
Now, many sellers tell us they don’t really care about getting their Item Specifics right because they still end up making sales regardless of whatever they write in there. You can argue that the above item still has 9 watchers meaning there are some buyers who managed to find it.
Our data however shows that it does make an impact on your sales volume if you manage to crack your way around sizes on each eBay site. Just check the below chart based on an example of ten fashion sellers using WebInterpret for whom we corrected their sizes in Australia.
So what should you do to get your sizes right and grow your sales by 48%in one week?
- check if your items show up in eBay search results when filtered by size
- if not, check the items that do show up and write your sizes in the same way as your competitors who mastered eBay’s search engine
- when selling abroad, create a separate listing for each main eBay site with only one size per market
- convert the sizes taking into account that they differ per European country
- don’t write anything in front of your sizes, type only the numeric value
- once done, you can relax and watch your sales soar – online fashion shopping is still bound to grow fast over the years to come!
ecommerce ninja blog 