The repair order
- Title: does it contain the words a buyer would type, in the order they would type them?
- First line: does it say what the thing is and who it is for, in one sentence, before any adjectives?
- Main photo: can a stranger tell what is being sold at thumbnail size, on a phone, with the sound off?
- Price: is it derived from what the thing costs you to make plus what the market charges, or from a feeling?
- Description: does it answer the four questions - what is inside, what format, how it arrives, what it does not include?
- Then, and only then, look at tags, banner images and the wording polish.
One change a week
Change everything at once and you learn nothing, because you cannot tell which change did the work. Change one line a week, write down the date beside it, and after a month you will have a short list of what your buyers actually respond to.
A week is long enough for a quiet listing and too short for a busy one, so use two weeks where the traffic is heavy. Judge by views and saves, not by how much you like the new line.
- Keep the old version of every line you change. A change is only an improvement if you can compare it with what came before.
- Change the thing the buyer reads first, not the thing you enjoy editing.
- If two changes in a row make no difference, the problem is probably further up the list.
The price line deserves arithmetic
A price set by feeling usually means one of two things: the work is being subsidised without anyone deciding to subsidise it, or the listing sits above its market for no stated reason. Work out your floor first - what the item costs you in materials, time and fees - and treat anything above that floor as a choice you can explain out loud.
The free calculator takes your own cost numbers and returns a price that covers them. Nothing leaves the page, so you can test three versions before you touch the listing.
- Write the floor down before you look at competitors, so their price does not become your floor.
- If your current price is below the floor, either raise it or stop selling that item. Both are honest.
- Recheck the floor when materials, fees or platform rules change. Fee changes happen quietly.
What to ignore for now
- Rewriting the whole description before the title has been fixed.
- Buying ads to send strangers to a listing whose first line explains nothing.
- Copying a competitor's tags without knowing what they were aiming at.
- Redesigning the entire store before a single listing has been read properly.
The free tool for this
A price that covers the cost and leaves something - A price that covers the cost and leaves something. It runs in the page, asks for your own numbers, and sends nothing anywhere.
If you would rather not build it yourself
Listing Lab holds 168 fill-in lines for titles, hooks, benefits, price justification and objections, plus a scoring grid for telling which version is worth publishing. Listing Lab is $11. See it on the shop, and there is a plain page about it here: what it holds.
Questions people actually ask
How long before I judge a change?
A week for a quiet listing, longer for anything seasonal, and always against the same measure you used before the change. Otherwise you are comparing moods.
Should the title be a proper sentence?
No. It is a search line first and a sentence second. Say the thing clearly, because cleverness has nothing to index.
Read next
How to write a product title that people actually find, How to write a product description that does the selling.