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4 WAYS YOUR PRODUCT WILL BE MERCHANDISED – ONCE YOU’VE ADDED A GTIN TO YOUR EBAY LISTING

10 October 2017

How do sellers empower large platforms to ‘surface’ their products whilst provide their customers with a more interesting and relevant shopping experience? … using the GTIN.

eBay’s drive to add product identifiers – GTINs – to their listings pages is part of their wider structured data project. By organising your product in a structured way, they can display your product in more interesting and relevant ways.

By uniquely identifying your product, you can help platforms such as eBay pull together all the information about your product from all over the web. This additional information creates new buying experiences and helps to promote your product beyond your listings page and search results.

Here are four features to help you promote your product once you’ve added a GTIN.

1.     Be seen on more product pages

Structured data is all about understanding more about what’s listed on eBay – and this understanding is shaping the evolving browsing experience for users. Buyers are now being shown more relevant products throughout their shopping journey. eBay have called this a move to product based shopping experiences.

By making sure you’ve got the right product identifiers for your products – they’ll be shown on their relevant product pages.

These pages are packed full of information about a particular product including:

  • Pricing information for different item conditions
  • All the listings of this product (with the same GTIN)
  • Other products people also viewed
  • Complimentary products
  • Product information
  • Reviews

GS1, listing tips, eBay, ebay sellers tips, GTIN

 

With so much more information readily available these pages are designed to help shoppers make a purchase decision.  These product pages are only displayed if each item has a matching GTIN. This provides eBay, their sellers and the shopper the certainty they’re comparing apples with apples.

When searching on eBay to find the screenshot used above, it was clear how much easier it was to find the product I was looking for – and see the variations that were also available.

My initial search for ‘iphone 6s plus 32 gb’ returned some 477 results.

By clicking on the browse related option, I immediately limited these results to 86.

Further clicking onto one of the best-selling variations of the device at the top I landed on the product page shown above with just 9 items for sale.

Adding a GTIN here has clearly helped improve the shopping experience – grouping the same products together so that shoppers can be sure they’re looking at the exact same item, promoting confidence that what they’ll receive is what they’re after.

2.     Reach buyers with reviews

Reviews also play a huge role in fostering enough trust for a shopper to part with their hard-earned cash.

However, they’re also great for helping promote your item, particularly when it comes to search!User-generated content is great for SEO. Offering fresh, keyword rich content to pages that might not be updated all that often.

Shoppers think about what’s important to them, so when reviewing a product, they’ll include terms they themselves are likely to be searching for. Even the best copywriters and SEOs cannot account for every term, so having this content added to your product listing will help it show up in more search results – particularly long tail searches.

So adding reviews to a product not only helps to convert traffic that reaches your product pages, they drive traffic to the pages also. Evans cycles found that after adding reviews, traffic to their site increased by some 23% – with one product getting 361% more search visits than before.

3.     Highlight value

If you lead your niche in terms of pricing strategy – you can have your offer displayed across eBay through the ‘price trending at’ feature.

4.     Be found in more places

One of the benefits of trading on a marketplace like eBay is getting free advertising on search engines such as Google. So, making sure they have the best information for the performance of that ad is vital to helping attract customers to your listings and getting a sale.

A GTIN is one of the pieces of information Google will ask for when placing a Product Listing Ad. Unique product identification allows them to understand what information they have about a product from various sources across the web. With a clearer picture of what the product is, Google can then display what it does know to a searcher in the most relevant and engaging way.

An example of this is the product cards that you’ll now find for some products.

GTIN example, ecommerce

The PLAs for the above search, all fall onto a single card – alongside product information, related products and reviews.

So in summary, to ensure your product is included in the most relevant and highest conversation opportunities, you should capture the GTIN in your product information. Doing this not only improves your product visibility but sets you up for future search trends such as assistants, voice search and image search technology – all requiring a GTIN.

 


GS1 UK is a community of over 31,000 members working in retail, foodservice, healthcare and more. GS1 UK is one of 112 independent, not-for-profit GS1 organisations operating across 150 countries worldwide. GS1 UK helps everyone involved in making, moving and trading goods, automate and standardise their supply chain processes using the common language of GS1 global standards.

In order to trade with most of the UKs leading brands, retailers and marketplaces, you need to be part of the GS1 UK community and have a unique product identifier – the GTIN (Global Trade Item Number).

Find out more about GS1 and how our standards make life is simpler, quicker and cheaper for everyone.

 

Let us develop a tailored solution for your business that will help you reach new international customers and grow your global sales.

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