Listing
A listing is a product’s entry on a marketplace or shopping channel: the title, photos, price, description and details a buyer sees there.
- Product listing
What it means
A listing is how one product appears on a channel you do not run: an eBay listing, an Amazon listing, a free listing on Google. It is built from your product data, but in the channel’s format and under its rules.
eBay UK’s guide to creating a listing has five steps: a title, photos and video, item specifics, a description and a price. The title has 80 characters, and eBay’s search “finds the listing titles that closely match” what a buyer searches for.1
Item specifics decide which filters a listing appears under: “When buyers apply filters to search results, only listings with matching information will be shown.”2
Think of it like this
A listing is the card in an estate agent’s window. The house is the same whichever agent shows it, but each agent has its own card layout, and buyers judge the house by the card.
For example
Why it matters
Buyers on a marketplace never see your spreadsheet, only the listing, so every gap or typo in the data shows up there. A listing missing what the channel requires may not go live at all: eBay UK blocks a new or revised listing without its Required item specifics.3
Not to be confused with
A listing is not a merchant listing. Merchant listing is Google Search’s name for structured data on a product page “where customers can purchase products from you”.4
Sources
- eBay UK Seller Centre. Create great listings.
- eBay UK Seller Centre. Product identifiers.
- eBay UK Seller Centre. Item specifics.
- Google Search Central. Introduction to Product structured data.