About half of our clients come through marketplaces and classifieds, so we’re always working on improving how we market through those channels. For Biz-cen.ru we use platforms like Cian, Yandex Realty, Avito and others. With LavishShoestring.com, our vintage goods project, we listed items on Amazon, eBay and Etsy. While paid search ads come with tons of settings and detailed analytics, marketplaces don’t give you that kind of control. So, to attract more customers, we build custom tools on top of those platforms.

The built-in marketing tools on marketplaces often make it surprisingly hard to understand how listings are ranked. For instance, on Amazon, tracking daily views for a specific category means manually logging stats day by day, adjusting the date range each time. And Avito still doesn’t show a daily breakdown of views, you can only see the total number of views since the listing went live.

There are two main reasons:
— First, marketplaces don’t want to overwhelm users with too many settings. They stick to a simple model: want more customers? Pay the platform more. On eBay, for example, you can boost your ranking in search results, but only if you agree to give the platform a bigger cut when the item sells.
— Second, building solid advertising tools inside a platform is tricky. It’s a balancing act. If they give sellers too much clarity, say, explaining how headlines affect ranking, some businesses will game the system to climb higher in the results. That might work for sellers, but it often leads to messy, unreadable titles for buyers.

We study each marketplace’s search algorithm and build custom layers on top of their internal analytics systems. To make sure the way we optimize our listings actually leads to more sales, we run experiments. And since marketplaces don’t offer tools for quick testing, we automate the whole process ourselves.

An example of our work to boost sales on Amazon
To boost item sales on Amazon, we started by building keyword sets for each product category, vases had their own, decanters had a different one. Next, we created an auto-generator for titles that pulled info from each item’s questionnaire and began testing how the order of words in the title affected search rankings. Then we moved on to bullet points, experimenting with how different descriptions impacted visibility and conversions. After that, we added up to 1500 relevant keywords to each product. Amazon doesn’t let you include keywords during bulk uploads. So we had to build a separate module that updated each listing after it was already live.

Working to grow customer traffic from marketplaces is a niche in marketing that very few people tackle professionally. Every now and then, a new tool pops up that automates a small part of the process, but I’ve never seen a single product that fully covers even one marketplace end to end yet.