The plainer listing usually wins.
A listing that reads beautifully and does not say the size, the condition or what postage costs loses the sale to a duller one that says all three. Buyers are not choosing prose. They are choosing the listing they can decide from.
This is the one for everywhere else.
There is a version of this job for Etsy, for eBay, for Amazon, for Vinted, for Depop, for Facebook Marketplace, and for six kinds of property and trade advert. Each of those knows its platform's fields, its limits and its policies. This one is for everything else: your own website, a Shopify store, Gumtree, a Facebook group, a WhatsApp catalogue, a marketplace we have no rubric for, or a listing you are drafting before you have decided where it goes.
Which means it will not guess at a platform's rules. Where something genuinely depends on where you are selling — a character limit, a required attribute, a fee, a returns position — you get the thing to check rather than an invented figure. A confident number about the wrong marketplace is worse than no number, because you would act on it.
What it does everywhere is the part that decides most sales: whether a buyer can make up their mind from what you wrote. The failure is nearly always the same shape — a listing that describes the item well enough and never states what it is, how big it is, what condition it is in, what is included, or what the buyer pays in total.
An adjective is a fact that went missing.
Every unverifiable word in a listing marks the exact spot where a specific was available and was not used. "Premium" is standing where the material should be. "Spacious" is standing where the dimensions should be. "Rare" is standing where the production run, the year or the reason should be. The writer knows the specific — they are holding the thing — and reached for the adjective because it was quicker and felt more persuasive.
It is not more persuasive. A buyer scanning six listings for the same item is not weighing which one sounds best; they are eliminating the ones they cannot decide from, and an adjective gives them nothing to decide with. Worse, a listing dense with them reads as a seller who is either careless or hiding something, and the buyer cannot tell which from the screen.
So the first pass is a subtraction. Every claim that cannot be traced to something you supplied comes out and is replaced by a named gap — not by a different adjective, and not by a fact invented to fill the hole. The score is capped by what is missing rather than by how it reads, which is why a fluent listing can come back with a poor score and a blunt one can come back with a good one.
The two that cost most are almost always the same pair. The first is a condition described in a way the photographs contradict, or a flaw you mentioned in passing that the copy then quietly drops — the buyer finds it either way, and finding it after paying is a different event from finding it before. The second is the total: postage split off, or a headline price that is not what leaves the buyer's account. Both are omissions rather than errors, which is why nobody spots them by rereading their own listing.
Where it stops, and why that is the useful part.
It will never state a measurement, a material, a model number, an age, a provenance, an authenticity, a warranty, a certification or a postage cost you did not give it. Each of those comes back as a placeholder naming exactly what is needed.
Beautiful vintage teak sideboard in excellent condition. A rare mid-century piece, solid throughout, genuine 1960s. Measures approximately 150cm. Free delivery.
Teak sideboard, [ADD FACT: width × depth × height in cm]. [ADD FACT: era or maker, and how you know — a label, a receipt, where you bought it]. Condition: [ADD FACT: each mark, scratch or water ring and where it is]. [ADD FACT: solid teak or teak veneer — they are different and buyers check]. Collection from [ADD FACT: area], or delivery at [ADD FACT: cost, or state it is included in the price].
Nothing in the second version was invented to replace what came out. It got shorter and more specific, and every gap is a thirty-second job for the person who owns the sideboard and an impossible one for anybody else.
One more fork it will not resolve on your behalf: whether you are selling privately or in the course of a business. Your obligations differ, and if the listing is ambiguous about which you are, it says so in the next actions rather than assuming either.
What happens after you pay.
- Paste the listing, or give a public link. Whatever you have, in whatever state. If you know where it is going, say so in the text — it will use that.
- Top up once. store credit. This job uses never more than 40p and spends only what it uses, so one payment usually covers seventeen listings. A change is another go at the job, so it costs pence too.
- You get a score and a rewrite. The problems ranked, a title, a description, bullets for the facts a buyer scans for, and next actions — the things you have to do away from the keyboard, like measuring it or photographing the flaw.
A generation that fails spends nothing.
Who it is for.
Use this one if
- You sell on your own site or somewhere without a dedicated version here.
- You are drafting a listing before deciding where to put it.
- You list the same item in three places and want one solid base to adapt.
- You know the listing is thin and cannot see which part.
Use a specific one instead if
- You are on Etsy, eBay, Amazon, Vinted, Depop or Facebook Marketplace. Those versions know the fields and the limits, and this one deliberately will not guess at them.
- You are advertising a property, a room, an Airbnb, a car, a trade profile or a local business. Those carry duties a general listing does not.
- You want platform-specific compliance checked. This will tell you to check; the tuned versions know what to check against.
The questions a seller asks about a listing that has stalled.
My listing is on a site you have never heard of. Does that matter?
That is exactly what this one is for, and it changes how it behaves: it assumes no platform's fields, limits, policies or fees. Where a rule genuinely depends on the marketplace — a character cap, a required attribute, a returns position — it names the thing for you to check on your own platform rather than quoting a number that might belong to somebody else's. If you are on one of the big marketplaces or a property portal, the version built for that platform knows its rules and is the better buy.
Why is it not selling? It has had plenty of views.
Views without messages is a different diagnosis from no views at all, and it is the more common complaint. No views is usually a title problem: the words a buyer would actually type are not in it. Views without action is almost always a missing fact — the size, the exact condition, what is included, what the postage costs, how quickly it goes out. Somebody who cannot answer those from the page does not message to ask, they leave. Completeness and trust are weighted above polish for that reason.
Should I really list the flaws?
Yes, and it will not hide one you have mentioned. A flaw described plainly is a fact the buyer accepted before paying. The same flaw discovered on arrival is a return, a refund, and on most platforms a mark against you costing more than the sale was worth. It will not upgrade your condition wording either: it never asserts that an item is genuine, unused or fault-free on the strength of your own adjectives, and it will not write a condition the photographs would contradict.
Can I give it the link instead of pasting the text?
A public link works on many sites. It fails on the largest marketplaces, which block automated fetching, so you get an error rather than a quietly worse report — and pasting works everywhere. Paste the title and the description together rather than one or the other, because a good share of the ranked issues concern the relationship between the two. A title carrying no search terms sitting above a body that contains all of them is a very common and very fixable shape.
Where do the marked gaps in the rewrite come from?
From facts a buyer needs that you did not supply. It will not state a measurement, material, model number, age, provenance, authenticity, warranty, certification or postage cost you have not given it — each one becomes a marked gap in the rewritten text instead. That is why the rewrite arrives with holes in it. Filling them is ten minutes with a tape measure, and it is the part that actually moves the listing, because the gaps are precisely where the buyer's hesitation was sitting.
Am I a business seller? I have started selling rather a lot.
It will not decide that for you and it is careful not to assume either way, because a business seller's obligations to a buyer differ from a private seller's and the wrong assumption produces confidently wrong advice about returns. Where your input is ambiguous it says so and puts the question in the things to do rather than picking one. It is worth resolving, since the answer changes what your listing has to say about cancellation and returns.
Get it read.
Paste the listing. What comes back opens with what is missing, then deals with how it reads.
Top up once. No subscription. About 28p — never more than 40p.