Using Bonanza Item Traits

Item traits are a way for Bonanza to get detailed information -- like genre, brand, or color -- about your items so we can help more buyers find them. Research from other sites has shown that items with trait information generally sell 25-35% better than those that don't.

Bonanza offers you many different ways to specify the detailed traits for your items. This guide will lay out your options, and answer our most frequently asked questions about item traits.

Questions

• I want to edit my item traits NOW
• Give me a brief primer to item traits
• Do all categories have item traits? Which do and which don't?
• How do I add item traits to my items?
• How do item traits help buyers find my items?
• How do item traits compare to Google Base attributes?
• Tell me about Item Trait Profiles

I want to edit my item traits NOW

Woah, woah, calm down there buddy. You can edit your traits whenever you want, we promise not to try to stop you!

Just come back to this page when you're logged in and have a booth, and we'll put a link to edit your item traits right here.

Give me a brief primer to item traits

There are many ways to help buyers find your items amongst the millions of items that are available online. Item categories ("Collectibles," "Video Games," etc.) are a great start, but often times a category alone can not capture all of structure details that buyers will want to know when they're searching for an item.

For example, say you're searching for a necklace for your niece. You would start by browsing to the "Jewelry & Watches -> Fashion Jewelry" category, but once you were there, you would be presented with green necklaces, red necklaces, gold necklaces, platinum necklaces, etc.

Item traits are a way for buyers to dig deeper within a given category, so in the hypothetical scenario above, the buyer might create a search filter so they see only items with a ruby gemstone and a silver band.

Search engines love to get detailed information like this, and Bonanza will automatically take the item trait information you give us and translate it into data that is meaningful to Google, when possible. This will lead to a higher search ranking for your items, and ultimately, more buyers. To learn more about how item traits relate to Google Search attributes, click here.

Do all categories have item traits? Which do and which don't?

No. Many categories don't have item traits at all, and many more categories will only have very basic item traits, like whether the item is "new" or "used."

This is because for a very broad category like "Collectibles," there are few unifying characteristics that can be used to filter all "Collectibles." The more specific your item category, the more likely there will be item traits in that category. The more item traits you add to your item, the more likely it is to get found amongst the tens of millions of items that search engines browse through.

How do I add item traits to my items?

Item traits link from main page of new item form

Item traits page on new item form

Adding item traits can inherently be a bit of a chore if you have hundreds or thousands of items, so we've provided a couple different choices to make your life as easy as possible when it comes to specifying traits for your items.

Via New Item Form. This is the most straightforward way to specify item traits for your item, when available (remember, not all item categories have item traits available). To specify item traits, first choose your item's category (through browsing or otherwise). Then open the "Advanced Options" area on the new item form, if you haven't already. In the lower-left side, you will see a heading for "Item Traits." Depending on the category of your item, this area will either give you a link to edit traits for your item, or it will inform you that no traits are needed. If you have setup any valid Item Trait Profiles for the item's category, those will be listed here, too, to be applied immediately.

If you have a link to edit your item traits, it will take you to a new page of the new item form, where you'll be able to specify all item traits available for your item's category.

Via the Batch Editor. The item trait list can be accessed via the Batch Editor, under the "Item Traits" tab (on the left side of the batch edit page). There are two ways to set traits via the batch edit page. The first is by applying an Item Trait Profile to a selection of items. To apply an item trait profile, you will first need to use the "Category ID filter" (on the right side of the page) to specify a category for your items. After you have successfully filtered by category, the batch editor will show you all available Item Traits Profiles within the category you filtered. You can then select the items you want to apply the Item Trait Profile to.

The other options is to follow the link to "Edit traits for all items filtered." This will take you to a page that lists all items that match your current Batch Editor filter, where the full set of item traits for each item can be specified en masse. Here's a picture of what it looks like. This is probably the fastest method of choosing item traits for those that have a lot of items spread across different categories.

How do item traits help buyers find my items?

Three main ways. The first is that specifying item traits helps us feed more detailed information to item search engines (like Google), so when someone is looking for a "red" ring or a "blues" CD, we can definitely tell the search engine that we have those items. The second way is that, sometime in May 2009, the Bonanza search engine will be setup to present buyers with all of the available traits for a given item category. If you've setup traits for your items, then a buyer who applies a filter will find your items. The third way is that specifying item traits gives us more dimensions to make recommendations to buyers about similar items. Thus, if a buyer purchased red, size 11 running shoes a year ago, we can tell them what other shoes they might want to buy when their current shoes wear out.

Also, we are planning to soon make item traits show up in the body of an item, so that when a buyer is browsing to your item, they can quickly ascertain if it meets whatever specific trait they may be looking for.

How do item traits compare to Google Base Attributes?

Google Base attributes are way to provide detailed information about your items. In the case of Google Base attributes, these details are fed directly to the Google search engine, which helps more buyers to find your items.

When applicable, item traits will automatically be converted to their corresponding Google Base attribute. For example, if you specify an item trait for "color," "UPC," "size," "ISBN," or the like, we will automatically save this as a Google Base attribute, so if you put your items online via Google Product search, Google will know about all of the detailed information you specified via Item Traits.

Item traits are translated to their corresponding Google Base attributes any time you change item traits, so if you plan to use both item traits and Google attributes -- because you're a heck of an overachiever -- you'll want to keep in mind that your item traits will overwrite any similar Google attributes when you change your item traits. For example, if you were selling frosting and you setup a list of Google attributes like "[[color:red]] [[texture:creamy]] [[taste:yummy]]", and you then specified item traits that said your item was "blue," your Google attributes would end up as "[[color:blue]] [[texture:creamy]] [[taste:yummy]]" This means that, in most cases, if you have setup item traits for your items, you shouldn't have to worry about specifying Google attributes.

Note that we are still building out our translations from item traits to Google attributes, so if you come across an item trait that you think maps cleanly to a certain Google attribute, but we're not currently setting the Google attribute for you, drop us a line and we'll get it added.

Full documentation for Google Base Attributes here