Seller Pro-Tips Methodology

Note: This post is a follow-up to Seller Pro-Tips. If you haven’t read it already, go check it out!

In this post, I wanted to shed some light on the methodology used to arrive at the final seller tips. While this was primarily a data analysis project, following a sound methodology was fundamental in being able to produce something that would actually accomplish the post’s goals.

Keep the Goal in Mind

The main goal of the Seller Pro-Tips post was to generate tips for first-time sellers. While it was tempting to immediately start digging into the data, any insights discovered would have been unusable if they were not applicable to our sellers. Instead, it was important to operate with the goal in mind, focusing only on areas that were actionable and directly relevant to sellers.

Start With the Questions

The first step I took was to place myself in the shoes of a new seller. What would I be confused about? What would make the selling process easier for me? With this context in mind, I went and compiled a list of questions that I would want answered:

• How do I title my listing to attract the most buyers?
• What do I need to include in my listing description?
• How should I take my listing photos?
• How long is it going to take for me to sell this item?
• Should I hold out for a higher price offer or drop the price for a faster sale?

With this, it became much clearer where I should be looking to generate the final tips.

Be Specific, but Not Too Specific

The final step was to actually answer the questions raised in the previous step. With the questions of interest established, it was simply a matter of finding the right data and identifying the trends within.

However, having the data and statistics is still useless if it is delivered in a way that doesn’t serve the final goal. It wouldn’t be helpful to say something as vague as “long descriptions are worse than shorter ones”, but it would be just as unhelpful to be specific to the point of saying “listings with descriptions with exactly 36 words sell best”. While these would both be accurate representations of the data, they would provide little to no benefit for sellers. Thus, it was necessary that the final deliverable was presented in a form that would be understandable and actionable for sellers.

With these three steps in mind, we were able to focus on producing tips that would be both understandable and actionable for sellers on Grailed. However, this framework is by no means specific to this task — it can be applied to any exploratory data analysis, and can serve as a useful way to stay organized and on track throughout a project.