India table cloth

NEAT TABLCLOTH 100 % COTTON (NIP INDIA L@@K ! )


ended - Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Auction grade: D+

Starting bid: $9.99

Final selling price: $0 - no bids


Up for sale in this eBay auction is a brand new cotton tablecloth made in India. The seller claims that this is still new in the package, and the cloth itself doesn't have any holes or stains. From the pictures provided, you can get a good idea of this particular color pattern.

Right off the bat, that title for this auction needs some work. For starters, it's spelled "tablecloth", not "tablcloth" (same spelling error is made in the auction's description). The next thing to change would be to turn off the caps lock key on the keyboard. Having the entire title in capital letters loses its effect for gaining attention. This is just as bad as not capitalizing anything and leaving all of the letters in lowercase.

The seller also uses quite a bit of unnecessary spacing and wastes space. For example, there's a space in "100 %", and two extra spaces in "L@@K ! )". I would throw in extra words and phrases like "new", "table cloth", and "unique" to try to help it show up in other searches. Doing something fancy like "L@@K" is OK as long as you've already used all of the key words that you can think of for the auction. When you have the extra space in the title, weird things like that will help draw extra attention to your listing as long as not everybody else does stuff like that.

Again, the caps lock key needs to be turned off when typing the main body of text. I know that there usually isn't much to type to describe a new item like this, but it does help if the sentences are neatly spaced and easy to read. Nothing is more annoying than a seller who doesn't care about making things easy to read and view for the buyers.

It's good that the seller listed the dimensions of this tablecloth. Doing so will help buyers determine if it's the right size for their table. It's interesting how the seller used the word oblong instead of rectangle. They're both correct, but rectangle is more of a common search term. I would have found a way to also use the word "rectangle" in the description, whether talking about the tablecloth or table itself.

It appears a little bit odd having the "terms of auction" two lines below the auction's description. Between having a lot more text and having proper capitalization, it really looks out of place. It was probably placed there by the template that the seller used to create the auction. It's amusing how the seller spells "eBay" incorrectly as "E-Bay". If the seller cannot write eBay correctly, it makes you wonder if she is missing any important details about the item, or if the sizes are listed correctly.

The payment section also needs some professionalism. Apart from actually creating real sentences and capitalizing PayPal correctly (like she did in the "terms of auction"), for privacy and security reasons, it's bad that she listed her name and full address right there in the auction. Accepting checks and money orders in the mail is fine, but I would send the mailing information in the winner's e-mail instead of displaying it for the world in the auction, especially with this being a home and not a business address.

"Thank you and have a nice week."

Have a nice week? It's usually customary to wish somebody a nice day / evening / holiday. It just sounds odd to wish somebody a nice week.

The last thing to point out is the starting bid price. I did some online searching, and other designs for similar cotton tablecloths made in India were close in price. I saw a lot of online stores selling similar tablecloths from $20 to $50 (and much better designs in my humble opinion). That tells me that the seller may be trying too aggressive of a strategy, even if this is a brand new tablecloth.


Overall, many parts of this auction are sloppy and unprofessional. The differences in typing and spelling between the title, description, terms of auction, and payment show that the seller doesn't care about keeping things consistent. This is a lazy approach and shows a lack of respect to other buyers and sellers. Is that really important to sell an item on eBay? Probably not as much as what I'm criticizing, but it will turn away and annoy some buyers. Do you really want your buyers thinking that you're dumb or stupid?

A big factor for the low auction grade was the misspelling of tablecloth. By not spelling your main item correctly, you've pretty much signed the death warrant for this item. The viewing audience is greatly limited and the auction will not get nearly the exposure it needs. Such a major error nearly gave this auction a failing score, but the listed dimensions and extra pictures saved that from happening.

I personally expected a better organized and written auction from somebody who has gained over 2,600 positive pieces of feedback since July of 2001.