Online Selling Tip: Writing Your Item Listing on eBay

Let me first say that I am not an expert at online selling but have learned a few tricks along the way. This post is inspired to a conversation with a friend this morning about listing an item on eBay. She is posting her first listing today and asked me what she should say in her description for her item. She said that she had looked around at listings on eBay and saw that there were some good descriptive listings and some listings that had little to no info on the item. So that got me to thinking...what makes a great listing description?


Make use of all of the preset listing descriptions provided by eBay. What I mean by this is, depending on the product you are listing, when you list an item you will see boxes in your item listing screen that has options for you to choose size of product, style of product, condition of product, and more. The options that you choose in these presets will appear at the top of your listing description in a box and it will also help get you listed in a search that a potential customer will do for an item. Here is an example of what I am talking about. I used a book listing since it has a lot of details listed about the item.

A note about listing books is that when you first go under selling and choose books as the catagory it will ask for the ISBN # on the book and that will automatically list the details.

Start your listing description with the name of the product and quanity if you are selling a "LOT" of a specific item.This will make your listing start off clear on what you are offering and there won't be room for confusion from the buyer. In this description you will want to include quanity, accurate name of product, and size. If it is too long of a description, you can use the subtitle area to lost the size of the product.

When entering info in the description box be clear and well understood. Like I said before I am not an expert by no means but I have learned that an unclear listing will get you no buyers. You should start off by listing the same thing that you listed in the one liner description and then give details about the product, tell what the product does and how it will benefit the buyer will have if they bought the item. Don't overdue the description by making unclear statements. If it is a used item be sure to talk about any scratches or damages that the product has. If you don't do this you will be misrepresenting the product and you will most likely will get a return.

Give a clear Shipping Policy. Don't forget to let the buyer know how you will ship the item, what your ETA of shipping the item will be, let them know if insurance is available, and if combined shipping is an option. Again, remember to be very clear about what details you are trying to convey.

Give a clear Return Policy. Let your buyers know what your return terms will be for damaged items, shipping problems, who will pay for shipping a return, and let them know that shipping insurance is nonrefundable.