In the world of eBay, the subtitle is the line below the main listing title. It's an optional add-on (‘listing upgrade' in eBay speak) that currently costs 50 cents on the eBay site (35p on eBay.co.uk). Now, if you listen to the chatter on many of the eBay forums (don't do that by the way), you'll hear countless sellers dispense the advice that you shouldn't bother with the subtitle because it's too expensive. Well of course it's expensive if you're running hundreds of listings every week like most sellers do! More on that in a moment. You can see a subtitle circled in the listing example below:



So you understand what we're talking about, right? Renegade eBay sellers use the subtitle effectively as a marketing tool. Let me explain. Since the title is ONLY used for keywords in a properly prepared listing, the subtitle provides a great way to SELL the sizzle. By that I mean, the benefits rather than the features which tend to be covered by the title. Let's look at an example. In the next image you can see the title keywords that are purely factual. They do a good job of getting the listing to appear in the search results, but what then? This seller
has done the smart thing and included a subtitle where they provide some persuasive reasons to view the item, such as ‘new in box', ‘mint' and ‘over 20 years old'. Generally speaking none of these would be search terms, so the seller did the right thing in including them in the subtitle rather than the title.

“Renegade eBay sellers use the subtitle feature as a marketing tool.”

As with the title, it makes sense to use every available character you're allowed, but few people do that. You're paying the fee whether you use two words or ten, so why not use the most you can?

Since subtitles appear in the search results, that's another good reason to use them. On a typical page of search results, the listings that have subtitles will stand out from the crowd naturally.

I saw a great example of this recently when I went to buy a battery for my Dell laptop. You can see the search results page that came up in Exhibit B. Guess which listing I clicked on and bought from?

The answer should be obvious when you look at the options. One seller used the subtitle, and they used it really well to state the product was ‘original, not a cheap replacement part.' Maybe the other sellers also sold genuine parts, but that note was enough to convince me to buy from that seller rather than anyone else.

Of course, if you find that for some reason many sellers in your niche are using subtitles, then you'll probably get better results by not using one, because that'll be a way to get your listing to stand out. Renegades go against the flow, they stand out from the crowd. A word about the fee. If you're being smart about what you sell, and limiting yourself to just a few, powerful listings for products that you've created (ideally information based products) then you have nothing to worry about. 50 cents is nothing compared to the profit potential of the sale, AND the lifetime value of being able to sell over and over to even one customer from each listing. Once again, here's a resource that is ignored by most eBay sellers for stupid reasons because their reasoning is fundamentally flawed. Shhh, let's keep it our little secret.

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