Flippa Blog « Brand New Feature – Listing Tags!

The Flippa marketplace is big.  There are four hundred new listings a week and we know it’s hard to scan through those to find something you’re interested in – or, as a seller, to get your listing seen by the right people.

We’re taking a big step towards linking up the right buyers with the right sellers with the addition of listing tags.

Most people will be familiar with tags from WordPress, or Gmail, or any one of a million other sites.  On Flippa, they’re words or short phrases which describe a listing.  An example might be clickbank because it’s a ClickBank affiliate site, blog because it’s a blog, file hosting because it’s a file host, or weight loss, mafia wars or cooking because that’s the topic of the site.  They can be what the site does, how it does it or why it does it.

Tags for Buyers

The first thing you’ll notice is the new tag bar:

This shows you the most popular tags – the ones that have the most listings open right now – and clicking on them takes you straight to the “tag page”, which shows all the listings with that tag.

When you click through to listings themselves, you can see which tags the seller’s used, at the top on the right-hand side:

Of course, clicking on these also takes you to the tag page, so you can easily cross-reference.

On the tag page, you’ll see an important pair of buttons:

Subscribe is the same as it’s always been – access to an RSS feed showing all listings with this tag.  The Watch this tag is even better.  It adds the tag to your list of watched tags, and you’ll get an email each day collecting all the new listings for all of these.  It’s a really good way to keep an eye on niches you care about.

Tags for Sellers

As a seller, you get three tags for a listing. (We don’t want to give you too many and encourage “tag stuffing”.) You should tag your listing with whatever’s most appropriate, so that buyers can find you in the place they expect.

Set your tags now! Listings that are already open can have tags set retrospectively.

Keep in mind that tags which are obviously misleading will be removed permanently and they won’t be able to be replaced, so that’s something you want to avoid. And, more importantly, use the tag that everyone else is using for a topic.  If everyone else is using warcraft and you use world of warcraft then interested people will miss your listing.  We’ve got some smart autocomplete on the tag entry boxes to help you here.

Now, where it gets interesting for sellers is at the other end of the tag bar:

Clicking on all tags gets you to a page which has some useful stats about tags:

This is pretty straightforward.  The first two numbers are simply how many listings are open and how many have existed with this tag.  The third is more interesting.

What it shows is the number of buyers watching a particular tag.  This could be a useful form of market research.  If there are fifty buyers waiting for cooking sites, but only two cooking sites listed – that’s a space you should be in!  We’re interested to see how this develops…