Ebay Research

I receive a number of emails from people asking for advice on how to get more sales and greater visibility on eBay. A number of them express disappointment that the business they have launched has not been as successful as they hoped.

This is also a common theme running through many home business and eBay related forums. I was reading a post on one forum where someone had purchased a large amount of stock but had had little success in selling any of it on eBay and wondered why.

The problems these people are experiencing are all down to one thing. Lack of research. They have purchased products and believe that all they have to do is place them on eBay and they will sell, unfortunately, it’s not quite as simple as that.

EBay is just a market. A huge market, but just a market. People browse eBay looking for products they want. If they don’t want to buy a pair of rollerblades then they aren’t going to buy them, regardless of how cheap they are. So, if you’ve bought a thousand pairs you may have problems shifting them unless there’s a sudden surge in interest.

While it’s still possible to go to an auction and buy a load of items, and put them on eBay for a profit, it’s not as easy as it once was.  Auctions used to be an excellent place to buy stock.

I know because I used to buy computers from auctions about seven years ago for a computer business I used to have. Today auctions are not always so cheap. The problem is that they are full of people who’ve been watching programs about how to make money by buying things from an auction and reselling them. This has led to the sales price of items being forced up.

To avoid wasting your money on products that are difficult to sell you need to engage in a little research. The best way to sell on eBay is not to go out and buy some stock then try to sell it, but to first find out what buyers are looking for then go and locate the stock.  A little time spent researching can save you a lot of heartache and money.

Researching what’s selling on eBay is easy and you don’t need to waste any money on third party software because eBay provides you with all the tools for free. One of the most powerful research tools is eBay pulse, named appropriately because it’s the pulse of eBay.

This will tell you instantly what people are looking for on eBay. What the most popular searches are for, what items are been sought. This is a great research tool that eBay provides and you should use it. It is, I have to say, just one of many tools eBay provides for sellers to use.

I wrote a post in February about how to do some basic eBay research. It can be found here: http://www.middleagedinbiz.co.uk/how-to-research-whether-a-product-will-sell-on-ebay/ It’s never being easier to conduct research on anything by using the internet.

Researching product trends on eBay, average sales prices reached, successful auctions will take a couple of hours at the most.  By the end of your research, you’ll have a list of hot selling products and how much you can expect to get for them from eBay.

This puts you in a strong buying position. Armed with the average selling price of the products you’re looking for you can now make an informed decision about whether it’s worth your while purchasing stock at a certain price.

I think most traders, me included, have at some time, bought stock that we believed would sell instantly, only to find that it goes out of the door slower than an old dog you’re trying to take for a walk. To prevent this make sure there’s a market for the product before you buy it.

Getting Traffic To Your Ebay Store

Getting Traffic to Your EBay Store

Opening an eBay shop is a great way to get your products out in front of potential customers but the customers won’t just appear. You have to go out and get them and bring them into your shop. The best way to do this is to mix your listings between auctions and shop items. The more auctions you have running the more visitors you will get to your shop. Auctions on eBay are highly visible whereas shops are not.

The trick is to use auctions to attract people’s attention, once they see the auction and visit your page you then need to get them into your shop where your other products are. All you need to do is link them directly to your shop with a “Visit my shop for other great products” link at the bottom of your page.

Having a mixture of auctions and shop listings is the way to get large numbers of repeat visitors to your shop. I usually, as a rough guide, run about 25% of my listings as auctions if I want to have a busy time. If I want to keep my eBay store reasonably quiet while I work on other areas of my business. I stop all auctions and just keep my shop open. This guarantees me some constant visits but not the mad rush that comes with running auctions.

Like the supermarkets that use loss leaders to pull people into their stores, you should put things on auction for a low price. These don’t have to be expensive things. The objective of the exercise is to get people into your shop where they can browse through your products which are priced for profit. You could buy some small items and sell them at cost price. I recently read about a successful tactic employed by one seller to get people into his shop. He bought items from the pound shop and listed them as auctions. These had the desired effect of getting people into his shop.

Personally I put a variety of things up for auction. If you’re lucky you will create a bidding war and once people start bidding you will make a huge profit. I put a dvd on auction once and five people got into a bidding war, I ended up selling it for over £50.00.  I’ve just run a successful little campaign on eBay, putting up over forty auctions. The result was a huge increase in sales from eBay and my website. Not to mention the sales that took place outside of eBay. Some of the auctions I ran lost me a little money. But the overall picture was a large profit. If you lose a little money on some auctions just look at them as advertising costs

Don’t just open an eBay shop and sit back waiting for the money to start rolling in. Go out and pull the customers in by using auctions. It’s a great way to get traffic on eBay.

Pricing Your Products On Ebay

Competing on price on EBay is a sure way to disaster. Sellers who employ this strategy will find themselves at best working for nothing and at worse losing money. The eBay market place is full of different types of sellers who are all employing different strategies to achieve their specific goals. There is, for example the big players. These are guys who own large businesses and will use eBay to dump stock on. They may not be bothered about making a profit they just want rid of their stock so they’ll sell it at a low price.
You also have the big players who use eBay to attract customers to their websites. They will sell products below the market value knowing that once they hook a buyer they will then up sell other products to make a profit.
You also have people selling personal items that they no longer want, or unwanted gifts so they will sell these for a low price and of course you will have people selling products illegally, copies etc. For a new seller to enter this market place and try to compete on price is business suicide.
I write from experience as well as thorough reviews and experiments. In my early days of trading, I did try to compete on price and I paid the price for that folly. I run an online arts store www.artscraftsandhobbies.co.uk and I have my own eBay store Arts, crafts & Hobbies. A part of my inventory consists of painting instruction DVDs. When I first started trading, I started on eBay and I priced the DVDs low at £10.00 each. Now art instruction DVDs are quiet expensive, they retail for between £18.00 up to £60.00. I had a supplier who provided me them at a good price.
As I said, I originally priced them at £10.00, which didn’t leave me much of a margin but I was naïve,and as you know we all have to pay to learn. After engaging in quiet a lot of studying and experimenting, I saw that price increases didn’t affect my sales at all. So, I took the decision to raise my prices substantially. For example, I increased the price of my DVDs from £10.00 to £14.99.
Now this is a substantial increase but in reality, it’s around what I should have charged originally. My reasoning was simple I would have to take a huge hit on sales to actually lose revenue, I worked out it would have to be something around a 35% drop. If sales did drop by that amount then I would be still earning the same income level from less work. Sounded like a good deal to me.
Now here’s the strange thing. My sales in the first month of the price increase went up. I sold more DVDs that month than any previous month since I had started trading. And they have remained steady. I also sell plenty of products in my store that other sellers sell cheaper.
I do not try to compete on price. When I add a new product to my store I don’t even look at what others may be selling it for, I’m not interested. I price the product using my own system, which takes into account eBay and PayPal fees and gives me my profit margin. I’m not doing this to make eBay rich or to give things away. I’m doing this to build up an income for me and my family. I want rewarding for the work I put into my business otherwise it’s pointless.
So if you’re thinking about entering the eBay marketplace don’t get fixated on the prices others are charging for their products. Take your cost price and add eBay and PayPal fees then add your profit margin and that’s your selling price. Be professional and focused. People don’t just buy on price and you probably don’t want to do business with those who do. Other factors come into play like how well you have listed your item, feedback and trust. Experiment a little and see what happens.
Keep Trading

Paul

Getting Help From Freelancers

There’s so much involved in getting an ecommerce business off the ground that if you try to do it all yourself you run the risk of becoming overwhelmed and demoralised. There’s something’s that you have to admit, you will need the help of a professional.

Building a website for example. You can learn how to do it yourself, and I would advise you at least to get a working knowledge of websites. Having the knowledge to build a fully functioning ecommerce website is another thing all together.

Unless you are trained in website design, and building then leave this to the professionals. There’s nothing more off-putting than a cheap and badly designed ecommerce website.

Your website is your shop front to the world. If it looks cheap, no one will buy from it. Trust is crucial in getting people to buy from your website. And like it or not people judge by appearance, if you’ve managed to put an armature site up, it will show and turn people away. All your effort will have been wasted.

I have a little knowledge of most ecommerce skills. I can make an image in Photoshop but I’m no expert. I can put up a small website but I wouldn’t attempt to design a full ecommerce site.

I’ve learned the hard way that in the end it’s cheaper to hire professionals. Hire a graphic designer for your graphics; believe me it will save you a lot of time. You will have to pay for these services but not as much as you may think. www.elance.com is an excellent site for finding freelance professionals.

I’ve used this site a number of times and never been disappointed. I hired a graphic designer one afternoon and three hours later, he had designed me what I asked for at good price. He was an expert in Photoshop, the design would have taken me weeks and I would never have achieved the professional look he supplied me with. By employing him, I freed up my time to devote to my business.

We cannot learn everything in depth. We just don’t have the time. It would take years to learn Photoshop in depth, or website design. A successful business knows when to contract work out.

When you first start your business, you may not have the money to hire professionals. I would advise you to save up until you can afford to get a professional design. Re-invest your profits into your business until it is up and running.

It’s never been easier to hire freelance designers and website builders, on elance.com you can find people who will do anything. Presenting a professional front is crucial on the web, you may be working out of your bedroom but a professionally designed website will put you on par with the big players in your industry.

Don’t skimp on investing in your internet real estate.  When you’ve built up some profits, think seriously about hiring professionals to do your graphics and anything else that requires a professional touch.

Using Keywords To Get Your Products Noticed

Any market is only as good as the as the amount of customers it brings to the venue. The job of a market manager is to bring customers through the doors, that’s what sellers pay for, once the customers are in, then the market has done its job, it’s then down to the sellers to sell their products. EBay has done its job.  Millions of customers come to the site daily, as sellers it’s now up to us to get our products in the sights of potential customers.  It’s no good listing hundreds of products if no one can find them. So how can we increase our chance of getting our products noticed?

One of the simplest yet overlooked ways to make our listings more visible is the use of keywords. Keywords in the title of our listing will help to get our products under the noses of potential customers. So what exactly are keywords? Website owners and those familiar with search engine optimization seek to maximize their use of keywords because they know it’s an effective way of getting their products noticed. For the uninitiated, keywords are basically the words people type into searches to find a product.

When you list an item on eBay the first thing you fill in is the title. This is important. What you put into the title will determine how visible your product becomes and how easy it will be to find for potential customers.  Writing your title is a skill and you need to take your time over it. You have 55 characters and you need to use them all effectively to enhance the chance of your listing being seen. Let’s say for example, I’m selling an in car DVD player.  I’ve seen one where the seller had just put “DVD player” as the title. This is not the way to sell an item.

Remember you have 55 characters to get your listing noticed; you’ve paid for them so make them work for you. Back to my DVD player. If I was selling one I would list the full model:

Philips 7in twin screen in car DVD

Now I’ve listed exactly what it is I’m selling. If someone is looking for a Philips in car DVD player, my listing will show up in their search results. I have also though used keywords to spread my net wider. What if someone just types in “in car DVD player”? I’m still covered in my title. If someone types in “DVD player”, I’m still covered and my listing should show up. I haven’t put “player” on the end because I don’t want to waste my remaining characters which I can use for other keywords. Now think, what other words could people use to search for an in car DVD player? Maybe “in car entertainment” I can add this to the title:

Philips 7in twin screen in car DVD in car entertainment

Now you’re probably going to say, it doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t matter; you can make it nice and neat in your description. Your title is to get your listing coming up in the searches. Use every character if possible. Think out of the box. Once you’ve written what your product is, model, name, tech details etc, use the remaining characters to add other descriptions that people may refer to your product as.

Don’t waste your title by describing your product as “new” or “great” etc. These are all things that you can explain in the description; with only 55 characters you can’t afford to waste them. Notice I used the number 7 and didn’t spell it out. By doing so I saved four characters. The objective of utilising keywords in your title is to get your listing hit by hungry buyers not to win a grammar test.

Here’s a few essentials when using your title:

• You don’t need to use plurals. EBay’s search engine will find the item whether singular or plural
• Write numbers rather than spell them out
• Don’t waste characters by using adjectives like “great2 2good” etc. You can mention this in your descriptions.
• Check your spelling. Some people search eBay for misspelled titles, looking to get things cheap. If you’ve got an auction running and you’ve mis-spelled the word few people will find it. Those who do may get it cheaper than you wanted to sell it for.
• Can’t think of alternative descriptions. Look at the titles of other eBay sellers, especially the successful ones. Copy them
• Think outside of the box, use your imagination.

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