Tricks for Deciding What to Sell on eBay
Posted by Jim Johnson in eBay
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Few sellers achieve long-term success by milking the latest fad or by selling the hodgepodge of products you find at a typical garage sale. True success comes from identifying opportunities in defined market segments and aggressively pursuing those opportunities.
How do the eBay business masters decide what product categories on which they want to focus?
Research the Market
This is the most important trick for deciding what type of products to sell on eBay. You can fly blind and trust your hunches, but that makes eBay selling a bit like gambling: You roll your dice and you take your chances. A much, much better approach is to research the market first, using facts and data to tell you what products are the hottest sellers in the eBay marketplace.
Of course, you also want to examine pricing trends in these categories. If a category is stagnant in terms of unit soles but seeing price increases over time, it might be worth investigating. Conversely, a stagnant category with decreasing prices is one to be avoided.
Market research can also help you determine how best to market your eBay auctions. Close examination of the data can tell you the best starting price for a given product, which day of the week is best to end your auctions, even what keywords you want to include in your auction listings. The key is to examine the most successful auctions and determine what made them successful; incorporate this information into your auctions to maximize your sales.
The best categories for eBay success are those that are large and growing in both unit sales and average selling price.
On a cautionary note, you should avoid those categories that, over the past several months, are shrinking in size or that have seen significant reductions in average selling price.
The raw data is available free to any Seller willing to search eBay’s completed auction listings. You can find up to 30 days of data readily available, which will tell you how things have been moving in the past month. Naturally, you can capture this data on an ongoing basis; create a big database or spreadsheet of results and you can see trends over time.
If this auction-by-auction data collection seems a bit tedious (and it is), check out eBay’s Marketplace Research service (pages.ebay.com/ marketplace_research/). Marketplace Research lets you search up to 90 days of historical listings and then analyze key metrics—average selling price, average start price, and so on. The data is presented in pretty-looking tables and charts, which makes it easier to view trends over time.
More detailed analysis is available from both eBay and a variety of third parties, namely AuctionIntelligence, Vendio, eSeller Street, Hammertap, Mpire and Terapeak. This data is often accessible for a fee, although some sites offer their research services at no cost. What all these sites have in common is that they license eBay’s data through the eBay Data Licensing Program. In this program, eBay provides the data to the third-party site, as well as applies some control over what the sites can do with the data. So, if you use one of these sites, be assured that you’re getting genuine eBay data— but filtered through that site’s own unique analysis.
However you obtain historical sales data, how best can you use it? The key is to look not only at what’s currently hot, but also at trends. A category that’s red hot this month might be ice cold the next. A snapshot of eBay sales really doesn’t tell you much, but when you analyze sales and pricing trends over a period of several months, you get a much better sense of where that particular market is moving.
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