Most marketplace sellers know that including photos in a listing can help generate more bids and buyer activity, but we thought it’d be interesting to measure exactly how impactful pictures can be on your sales. That thought prompted Ngan, one of our awesome developers, to pull these great stats that may help you get more out of your listings.
First off, let’s take a look at our listing activity to date. Most of you guys include pictures of your items, but many of you stop at just one photo per listing:
We realize not all items benefit from multiple beauty shots–e.g., someone trying to win a book may not care to see it from all possible angles–so we also dissected our photo-per-listing counts into a few of our top categories:
The above shows the most common number of photos is still one (1), even across different types of items.
Now, here’s the interesting twist. If we compare the number of photos per listing with buyer activity (bids placed and credits spent), the numbers trend very differently. This chart shows how final credit amounts increase in listings with more photos:
And this chart shows how the number of bids placed is higher in listings that include more photos:
Pretty neat, eh? It’s cool to see how a few (or many) extra photos might motivate buyers to bid on your items. Even books, a category we thought didn’t need too many photos, benefited from additional pictures.
IN CONCLUSION: Next time you list an item, show as much of it as you can. Don’t stop at one picture if you want to get the most credits and bids possible. Every additional photo gives you an edge, so keep uploading and optimizing your listings!
Cheers, and happy trading!
This is interesting… however, I would bet if you really were able to look even deeper… the listings that had the most photos, like 6-10 pics… those listings probably had multiple pieces being offered… ie; jewelry: 1 pair of earrings, 1 necklace & 1 bracelet… 4 actual pieces, so it needs many more photos… and therefore, it would also get more & higher bids… versus just 1 bracelet or 1 ring, that wouldn’t need 10 photos. Same with clothing… I would bet it was multiple pieces… and multiple pieces could feasibly get more & higher bids. The reason I think this fits is also looking at the books category. As noted in the main topic… 1 book doesn’t need 10 photos… yet 8-10 photos of books also had more & higher bids… probably because it was listings for multiple books, like 3 or 5 books! That of course would garner more & higher bids than just 1 book!So, yes, I do think this is interesting information… but I also don’t believe it’s entirely accurate as it’s most likely comparing individual listings with multiple item listings, which wouldn’t gain the same amount of bids or the higher value no matter how many photos. The fact is most individual items I see listed have no need for 6-10 photos… a lot of listings should have 2, but rarely more than 2, unless it’s a very intricate item that needs more to show special detail or something. In fact, I get frustrated when someone puts up 8 photos, and 6-7 of them are identical to each other, a total waste… but they put them up just to have more photos. The fact is most single items, you shouldn’t need that many photos.And one other thing… many listings I see with 6-10 photos… many, many times, at least 3-4 of them are too blurry or fuzzy or something to make out anything, and are totally pointless to even be posted!! Many extra photos are just ridiculous and have no value!
Hey briguynv, thanks for your comment. We agree, the more photos a listing includes, the more likely it is the listing contains multiple items. However, it’s hard to argue that 2 or 3 photos (versus just 1) automatically means a listing contains a bundle of things instead of just one item. Our guess is that many 2 or 3 photo listings are for just one thing. And the awesome part of that is an extra 1-2 photos still increases the number of bids and credits earned.
We’ll try to write a follow up on how to improve picture-taking as well, because we agree the quality of photo(s) matters! Thanks for taking the time to read our post, and let us know if there are other Listia stats you might find helpful.
thank you listia for the info on pictures, once i increased how many pics i put on my auctions i saw a huge increase in watchers, bidders and final ending credits . rock on