Tuesday 7 September 2010

What to sell on eBay

What can I sell on eBay?

The most frequently asked question on eBay forums and blogs.

Well after you've sold everything in the loft, and cleared out the garage, what else can you sell. The simple and often overlooked answer, is to research the eBay market place. Find out what items buyers buying, and then as a seller offer those products for sale.

You can use the free research tools that eBay offers you. These tools are freely available for anyone with an eBay account. However, a lot of sellers are unaware that they exist, or even know how to use them.

One of the most overlooked research tools, is the category section. This is where the most frequent searches are alphabetically organised into category keywords.



If we select the Baby category, and then select Pushchairs & Prams within that category. We can see that there are around 20,000 items listed for sale. This is a hot category. If we look along the top, we can see the Related Searches, that people frequently use, when searching for Pushchairs & Prams. Try and use as many of these keyword search terms, as you can in your listing title.



Pushchairs & Prams as we can see, is a large category. You may have to narrow down your items to a particular section. Say, Pushchairs & Prams. You can always expand your categories to Buggy Boards, Footmuffs, Rain Covers etc. as you gain more experience in this field.

Ebay Pulse

Another underused tool on ebay is eBay pulse. http://pulse.ebay.co.uk/



eBay pulse lets you see the latest trends, and most popular searches on eBay UK. The opening page shows you the 10 most popular searches and the 10 largest stores. This is real-time up to date information that eBay give you for free.

But we're not interested in the items on that list. We want to find out about Prams & Pushchairs.

So we open the drop down category box, and select the Baby category.



At the time of writing, the second most popular search term in the Baby category was Pushchairs, and the eighth most popular was Prams.



So we know we've chosen a popular category, with plenty of searches. In other words there is real demand for these type of products.

Completed Listings

The last eBay research tool that I want to show you, is a type of search.

If you look to the right hand side of the standard search bar, you will see a link saying 'Advanced Search'. We need to click on that link and enter our search term.



In this case Pushchair. We enter it where it says 'Enter keywords or item number'. Scroll down the page, and look for a check box named 'Completed listings' click to select it, and then click the search button.



The results page that comes up is a mine of information. You can see how many items of the type your selling were sold and at what price. The items in Green are items that were sold and the items in Red are items that were not sold.



Using our eBay search term 'Pushchairs', we can see what did and didn't sell.

Open the items in Red and see if you can find out why they weren't sold. Was it the starting price, lack of bidders, a poor description, a poor layout. Similarly why were the Greens successful, low starting price, good layout, plenty of images, use of templates and try to emulate them.

Conclusion

Whatever product you decide to sell, spend a little time researching it's suitability for eBay. The methods I have described above can be carried out quickly and instantly.

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