Best Practices for Listing on Light Fish

When creating a listing on Light Fish, it’s important to create high-quality listings that will attract potential customers. Listings that are deemed low effort, have poor imagery, and lack a detailed description are subject to removal from our marketplace.

Sellers on Light Fish who follow our best practices will naturally attract more potential customers, but may also have their listings selected as featured listings. Featured listings appear at the top of their associated category pages, but also have the additional benefit of being promoted throughout the Light Fish website, including on blog posts that drive high volumes of traffic.

In this post, we will explore best practices so that you can craft excellent listings on Light Fish.

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Best Practices

If you've sold on other marketplaces such as eBay or Etsy, you may already be familiar with selling products online. To gain sales, it's essential to drive customers to your product pages. 

The more customers that visit your product pages, the more potential for sales to be made.

One of the benefits of selling on Light Fish is that we will organically drive traffic to your listings. However, as a seller, you will also be sharing traffic with others on the platform, so you'll want to have your listings stand out as best as possible.

Let's dig into this a bit further and review each step of the listing creation process.

Images

Uploading high-quality images is the most important part of creating listings on Light Fish.

Clear and interesting photos are essential to attracting customers to your listing pages. Light Fish allows for one primary image (the image which gets shown on the homepage and category pages) as well as two additional images, which are visible on the listing page.

Images will look best on our platform when set to a 4:3 aspect ratio. If your image is 16:9, you'll be allowed to crop the image after uploading the photo to Light Fish.

Listings that include images of fish out of water will be removed. While we're aware these images can be used to demonstrate a fish's size, consider using a highlight instead.

Seller Profile

Customers will be looking to determine your trustworthiness as a seller the moment they land on your listing page. 

We strongly recommend adding a profile photo, whether it's a photo of yourself or your business's logo, to convey that your listing is legitimate. Sellers should also provide descriptions about themselves or their business, and should choose between one of three profile badges that describe whether they're a hobbyist or business on Light Fish. 

Additionally, seller profiles can be enhanced with social media and personal website links. These changes can be made in your account settings.

Listing Titles

Listing titles should match what users might be searching for, utilizing the following format when possible: {keyword}, {scientific name}, {descriptor}

Listing Titles should be clear and concise. They should only describe the item that's being sold, and should not include offers such as "Free Shipping" or unnecessary text such as "Available For Sale" 

While sellers may want to include the words "Free Shipping" in the listing title, listings that offer a $0 shipping price will automatically receive a "Free Shipping" badge that displays underneath a listing's image.

Listing titles are automatically PascalCased 

Examples of Excellent Listing Titles

• Cherry Shrimp, Neocaridina davidi, SSS grade
• 2 Purple Moscow Guppies, Poecilia reticulata, M/F Pair
• 2x2" Dwarf Hairgrass Clumps, Eleocharis Belem, Live Aquatic Plants
• Hollywood Stunner Chalice Coral, Echinophyllia aspera, WYSIWYG
• Pink Skunk Anemonefish, Amphiprion perideraion, Live Saltwater Fish

Examples of Good Listing Titles

• Low Light Plant Bundles
• 6" Featherfin Synodontis
• 5(+1) Orange Pumpkin Shrimp
• Hygrophila Pinnatifida
• Algae Destroyer Pack
• Axanthic Copper Baby Axies (Axolotls) 2-4 Inches

Examples of Poor Listing Titles (subject to removal)

• My Crossed Guppies
• Zebra Danios $1 Each
• African Cichlid Breeder
• Snails for Sale

Listing Descriptions

Listing descriptions should provide context about the listing to the customer. Descriptions should be written with the intent that the customer is learning about the listing for the first time.

Sellers do not need to provide a live arrival guarantee in the listing description, instead, you can set a policy that will appear on all of your listings in your account settings.

If applicable, sellers do not need to provide specific water parameters in their listing descriptions. Instead, these can be added as a highlight.

Examples of Excellent Descriptions

"Green Jade Shrimp are one of the newest breeds Neocaridina. These gorgeous creatures range from light to dark green. When Green Jades are young or stressed, they have a tendency to turn blue. If they look a bit blue when you first put them in your tank, don't worry! They will turn green as soon as they feel settled. They make excellent clean up crews, as these little guys will eat just about anything. They enjoy company of other shrimp, so we recommend having at least 5."

"Beautiful Blue Dreams that are sure to add a vibrant splash of color to any tank, especially planted tanks! May contain some Blue Dreams that have black spots/patches on their body, a trait of Blue Diamond shrimp genes. Neocaridina shrimp are peaceful and a great clean-up crew for any community tank, even as small as 1 gallon. They eat algae, bits of sunken excess food, and biofilm off of surfaces and produce a very small bio load."

"Rotala is a great easy-medium level-of-care background plant. This plant is tall and has small, narrow leaves that can range in color depending on the water parameters from bright green to red. This plant loves nutrient-rich soil and would prefer CO2 infusion but it is not necessary. Trimming should be performed fairly regularly to maintain growth as this plant grows rapidly."

Examples of Poor Descriptions (subject to removal)

"Plants are currently in a 300-gallon tank with co2"

"Got guppy fry available for sale payment via venmo"

"If you want to buy please contact me whatsapp:320-4444-994"

Tags

Sellers can tag their listings with a predefined list of keywords. Tags include terms that describe a listing. For example, the "Peaceful" tag can be applied to a freshwater fish species with a peaceful temperament. The "Difficult to care for" tag may be applied to a hard-to-care-for species of coral in a saltwater environment.

Although optional, tags can increase the chances that your listing will be viewed by more potential customers. Tags allow your listings to appear in our site's internal search for the terms of which they're tagged.

Live Arrival Guarantee (also known as DOA or death-on-arrival policy)

Light Fish provides customers with a standard 2-hour Live Arrival Guarantee policy on all aquatic plants, fish, invertebrates, and coral. Customers are eligible for a 100% refund, including the cost of shipping, but are required to provide a clear photo of the unopened order by e-mailing support@light.fish within 2 hours of delivery. In the rare case of an issue with delivery, sellers will not receive payment and should file a claim with their shipping provider to receive a refund.

Highlights

Highlights are enhancements you can add to your listings to provide more detail to potential customers. Depending on what you're listing, certain highlights may apply.

There are two types of highlights: standard highlights, and water parameters.

Standard highlights allow the seller to set a shipping origin location. Sellers listing livestock can also set a max growth size and a recommended tank size. 

Water parameter highlights allow customers to see your current aquarium water conditions. Sellers can also educate potential customers by providing recommended water chemistry ranges. 

Examples of Excellent Listings

The following are two examples of high-quality listings from actual users on our marketplace. These listings provide valuable information to potential customers, and as a result have been selected as featured listings. 

Examples of Poor Listings

These listings are deemed low effort. They provide little value to potential customers. These listings are quickly removed from our marketplace.

In Summary

As you can see, many parts make up a successful listing. If you spend some time creating something attractive to potential customers, Light Fish will reward you with an increase in page views, which can eventually translate to more sales.

Now that we've covered the fundamentals, you should have all of the knowledge needed to create a listing.