Market insights

Where marketplace buyers actually come from

It is easy to assume buyers arrive on the homepage and search. Plenty do. But the traffic that turns into sales tends to come from somewhere else entirely.

Search engines, on a specific problem

Someone types their actual problem into a search engine and lands directly on an item page. That is why the first line of your description matters more than any keyword list: it is what gets shown in the result, and it is the whole basis of the click.

Category browsing, not search

Buyers who do not know exactly what they want browse a category and scan thumbnails. This is entirely a picture competition, decided at grid size, before a single word is read.

Somebody else's recommendation

A forum reply, a message in a group, a developer telling a client what to buy. These arrive as a direct link to your item, already trusting you. Nothing you do on the marketplace produces them; what you did for previous buyers does.

Your own store page

A buyer who liked one of your items goes looking for the others. This is the cheapest sale you will ever make, and it only works if your store page is worth landing on: a cover, a real bio, and items that clearly belong together.

What follows from this

The description's opening line, the first screenshot, and your store page do most of the work. Keyword stuffing does almost none, and a long feature list does none at all until somebody has already decided to read.

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