Your title is fine. Your fields are empty.
Brand filled in, everything else left blank. It is the most common shape of a struggling eBay listing and it is invisible to the seller, because the part they can see reads perfectly well.
Where the effort goes, and where it counts.
A seller with a listing that will not move rewrites the title. Then rewrites it again. Meanwhile the item specifics — style, size, colour, material, department, fastening — are a dropdown list that took no writing and got no attention, and those are the fields eBay's own seller guidance treats as the structured data behind search and behind the filters buyers narrow with.
This produces a specific, quiet failure. The listing is not badly written; it is thinly described. A buyer filtering to UK 9, white, lace-up will never be shown an item that left all three blank, however good the title is, because the listing never claimed to be any of them.
The other thing worth knowing before you pay for a rewrite: "free postage" with the cost folded into the price is not a clever move. eBay weighs what the buyer actually pays, and a headline that hides £4 of postage inside a £45 price competes against an honest £42 plus £3.99 on the same total while looking worse on the number buyers sort by. The report will take the fake free postage out. If that is not what you wanted, this is not the job for you.
A real listing, before and after.
From the eBay rubric the job is briefed with. The seller had done nothing wrong that they could see.
Title NIKE TRAINERS SIZE 9 GREAT CONDITION L@@K MUST SEE FAST POSTAGE
Item specifics Brand: Nike. (everything else left blank)
Description Nike trainers, worn a few times, good condition, any questions ask. Free postage!
Price £45, postage: Free
Title Nike Air Max 90 Trainers UK 9 White/Grey Mesh Lace-Up Used Good Condition
Item specifics Brand: Nike · Style: Air Max 90 · UK Shoe Size: 9 · Colour: White/Grey · Upper Material: Mesh/Leather · Type: Trainers · Department: Men · Fastening: Lace-Up
Description Nike Air Max 90 in white and grey mesh/leather, UK size 9. Worn approximately [ADD FACT: number of wears], general condition good with [ADD FACT: any visible sole wear or marks — see photos]. Original box [ADD FACT: included/not included]. Dispatched within [ADD FACT: dispatch time] via [ADD FACT: courier/service].
Price £42, postage: £3.99 Royal Mail Tracked 48
Seven specifics went from blank to filled. That is the whole change in ranking terms, and it took no writing at all — the words were already in the seller's head, they simply were not in the fields.
"L@@K" and "MUST SEE" are gone because they are against eBay's listing policy rather than merely dated. And note what did not happen: nothing upgraded "used, good condition" to "like new", nothing invented a model number or a product identifier, and nothing asserted the trainers are genuine. An identifier guessed rather than supplied miscatalogues the item, and an authenticity claim you did not evidence is the kind eBay takes seriously.
What happens when you pay.
- Paste the listing exactly as it is. Include the item specifics — even the blank ones, described as blank. That is the single most useful thing you can tell it, and a public link is fine if you would rather not copy it all out.
- Top up once, then spend pence from your balance. This job costs no more than 40p and charges only what the report actually costs, so the remainder stays available for the next listing or a different job. A change is another go at the job, so it costs pence too.
- A ranked report comes back. Score, the worst problems first, a rewritten title inside eBay's length, the specifics to fill and what to put in them, a rewritten description, and the things you have to go and check yourself.
A generation that fails costs nothing.
Honest fit.
This will help if
- Your listing sits in search with impressions and no watchers.
- You have never filled in item specifics beyond brand.
- You are selling secondhand and cannot judge how much of the wear to admit to.
- You are a business seller and are not sure what your listing has to say that a private seller's does not.
- You have copied a title style from a competitor and suspect it is against policy.
This will not help if
- You want the condition talked up. It will not turn "used, good" into "like new" without evidence, and that is the whole point of it.
- You want a product identifier found for you. It will ask you for the EAN or MPN rather than guess one.
- Your item is priced wrong. It reads a listing; it does not price a market.
- You want free postage kept as a headline while the price carries it. It will unpick that every time.
What eBay sellers ask when the views stop converting.
Do I have to fill in every item specific, or only the required ones?
The required ones get you listed. The optional ones get you found, because buyers filter on them. A blank optional specific is not a neutral choice: it removes your listing from every search where somebody ticked that box, and they never see what they missed. eBay's own seller guidance treats specifics as essential to being found. The report names the fields your category offers that you have left empty, and which of them a buyer is most likely to filter on, in order.
Does free postage actually help?
It is popular advice and it only holds when the postage is genuinely absorbed. Free postage with the cost folded into an inflated item price is a listed failure, because buyers sort on price plus postage — you have raised the number they sort on in order to advertise a word. If you can carry the cost, carry it. If you cannot, state the real postage and the dispatch time, which is the thing missing from most listings and the thing a buyer is trying to find out.
How honest do I have to be about the condition?
More honest than the grade tempts you to be. Generous grading is the failure that ends in an item-not-as-described case, and those do not stay inside the transaction: your defect rate feeds Seller Standards, and dropping below the Top Rated threshold demotes your listings in Best Match. So one generous adjective on one item costs visibility across all of them. It will not upgrade a condition grade to make a listing read better, and it will not write a condition your photographs would contradict.
My titles have L@@K and MUST SEE in them. Old-fashioned, but does it hurt?
It costs you the characters, and characters are the scarce resource: eighty of them, spaces and punctuation counted, and each one spent on filler is one not spent on a word somebody typed into a search box. Nobody has ever searched for must see. The rewrite spends the eighty on item, brand, model, size and colour, in the terms buyers actually use. The paid subtitle adds fifty-five more and is not indexed the way the title is, so it is not where facts belong.
I am selling my own things, not running a shop. Do I have to take returns?
A private seller and a business seller are in different positions, and the point at which selling your own possessions becomes trading is not a number you can look up in your listing text. If you are a business seller, the fourteen-day cancellation right under the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013 is the floor, a returns policy narrower than it is a listed failure, and so is the missing trader identity eBay's business seller policy requires. It will not classify you; where the input is ambiguous it says so rather than assuming.
Should I use the manufacturer's photograph?
Not for a used item. A stock photograph shows a thing you are not selling, and the gap between it and what arrives is where most disputes here begin. Use it for a sealed new item if the category permits, and photograph anything that has been out of the box. The other half of the same problem is the missing product identifier: a listing with no EAN, GTIN or ISBN where the category expects one is invisible in every search that relies on them.
Should I start the auction at 99p?
It depends on how many people are watching that category on the day, which is the part nobody can tell you from the listing text. A low start works where there is genuine competition and is a way of giving your item away where there is not. A start price mismatched to real demand is flagged as an issue, and a reserve is the expensive middle ground, because it costs you the bidders who assume they cannot win. It will not price your item — that is your call, against completed listings.
Have it read.
Paste the listing and the specifics. The report opens with what is missing, because on eBay that is almost always the answer.
Top up once. No subscription. About 28p — never more than 40p.