Warning: Relisting Kills Your Visibility.

[vernonhouseclearing]

Recently I went on holiday and ended all my active listings. These listings previously had multiple watchers and plenty of views. When I got back, I relisted them — but after two full days I hadn’t had a single view on any of them.

I’ve since learned that relisting puts your item right at the bottom of search results because it keeps the old listing ID and the old “poor performance” history. It does not get the new‑listing boost.

I ended the items again and this time used Sell Similar instead of Relist. Within 6 hours I’d sold two items and received an offer on another.

So if you ever need to end a listing and bring it back later, don’t use Relist — use Sell Similar. It creates a fresh listing with a new ID and gets proper visibility again.

[go_ahead_buy_me]

Agreed, most of the time Sell Similar is going to be more beneficial than Relist.

Did you set your account to holiday mode?

In my experience, it is this setting that seemed to penalise me.

A couple of years ago I was selling on average one item a day. I then hurt my back and had to put my account in holiday mode to stop sales while I recovered. About a week later and I took it off holiday mode, but the following week I only sold one item in total. It took over 6 weeks to return to normal sales.

[vernonhouseclearing]

---

@go_ahead_buy_me wrote:

Agreed, most of the time Sell Similar is going to be more beneficial than Relist.

Did you set your account to holiday mode?

---

No, I just ended them before going.

[4_bathrooms]

---

@vernonhouseclearing wrote:

I’ve since learned that relisting puts your item right at the bottom of search results because it keeps the old listing ID and the old “poor performance” history. It does not get the new‑listing boost.

---

That's entirely logical because a relisted listing is not a new listing.

[department28]

'So if you ever need to end a listing and bring it back later, don’t use Relist — use Sell Similar. It creates a fresh listing with a new ID and gets proper visibility again.'

I only found this out myself by accident, when I wanted to see what an item I'd just relisted looked like amongst other items on the search results page, and couldn't work out why it wasn't appearing anywhere on the first page.

No doubt there will be others who aren't aware that using relist, or allowing your items to auto-relist, means they won't appear as 'newly listed'.

I can't remember when this started, maybe around the time 'promote your listing' was introduced?

[suelel1968]

Hi @department28 Interestingly, Ebay and Google clash on this issue. At one of the seminar  events eBay did where they invited Google along, Google said not to 'sell similar' regularly as the way their search function works finds items which have been listed for longer. Ebay, did say that they still think "sell similar" is important for eBay search criteria.

So I suppose there is a possibility that if you sell regularly via external searches you may want to relist. I am totally in favour of "sell similar" of any items which have no/low views and relisting items which have more than 3 views.