Sales of private labels are booming all over the world driven by easy ecommerce, the likes of global marketplaces like eBay, consumer-friendly prices and changing shopping habits. Peer through any of eBay’s 45,000 categories and amongst the inventory will be a barrage of white and private label brands.
The white and private label trend is not stopping. Clever and entrepreneurial upstarts are spotting customer needs that are not being answered by products or brands already out in the market and with easily accessible manufacturing and quickened supply chain processes, anyone and everyone can really have a go at launching a product to market. But not everyone will be successful.
How do you evaluate your white or private label opportunity? Here are some tips on how to use ShelfTrend and data from eBay, the world’s largest online marketplace, for some answers.
Do you already have an idea of what you want to sell?
If you don’t already have an idea of the category of products you want to sell, you need to start with what you know. If you’re a hairdresser by trade – look in the hair products category on eBay. If you’re a fitness coach or a yoga teacher, focus on the equipment or apparel that best suit your sport. If you’re a cat-lover, then pounce on the cat supplies category.
Starting with what you know or what you’re passionate about will help you be a better private labeller. From your personal experience, you will have inside knowledge of, for example, how different lengths of hair brush bristles would better suit various hair types or conditions. The extensive time you have had face to face with your fitness trainee gives you a better understanding of their training inhibitions and issues – and chances are, you already know how to solve them…if the right product existed.
Research is critical. Get yourself acquainted with what is being sold on eBay.
On ShelfTrend, run a Top 500 report for the category or product you want to sell. Examine the list. Get to know the sellers. The brands that are out there – you’ll recognize the make up of white and private labels as well as mainstream brands. Observe the price ranges. Don’t just explore the data, dive deeply into it. Examine it thoroughly. More importantly examine the different product features and identify those that stand out.
Private labelling is all about product innovation and addressing that next customer problem.
Really pick through the different product features in the product range. Are you noticing common product features like: organic, or extra padded, or magnetic pockets?
Identify the product features that are coming up again and again, or the unique features that make a product stand out to you. Remember, sellers will call out product features that they believe will attract their customer or will convince their customer to buy. Pay attention to other sellers in the space because they too are developing products for the same customer.
Here are two ways to really get into the throngs of the product features.
1. Work with the data to spot profitable product features.
The filter section - left column - of ShelfTrend’s reports offer great search and filter features to help you identify and zoom into the detail of some of the products in the data. As you work with the data, the summary boxes at the top adjust and recalculate.
The Search bar allows you to look for words that may arise in the listing title, a seller’s name, a brand, item specifics or even in the location of the product.
With a broader data report, the category filter could help you narrow down the product type.
Use the price filters to isolate to a range. Most sellers engaged with manufacturing will know that price ranges give indication to quality, features, product capabilities as well as potential margin.
Sort is also available at the top of each column in the data tables. Click once to see ascending values starting with the smallest value. Click a second time to see decending values, starting from the largest value.
In the above example, I looked into the photo frames category in Home & Garden. Most customers will agree that there are a lot of photo frames out in the market, but not many that adequately reflect popular decorating trends - unless you go to a professional framer.
Clicking on the category filter, there are no further subcategories in the eBay product hierarchy. I use the search box to look for and assess photo frame types - box frames, poster sized and square. With each search, the data adjusts and the summary boxes recalculate. There are other product features I intend to research in this manner - such as material and size.
ShelfTrend offers some really great tools to explore the data - definitely use them.
2. Download the data and work on it offline.
Some of you love excel or other data analytical tools out there. We love them too. If you’re a Premium user, download the data to csv. From there you have a host of other features that you could use to search, filter, recalculate or pivot across all fields, plus many more data points that we could not fit into the ShelfTrend app.
Working in excel gives you additional flexibility that could come in handy. For example, because eBay product data is hardly ever complete or clean, it is really useful to be able to add another column and manually add data fields and values that could be important to your sourcing and product design criteria.
In this example here, again with frames, I have manually added a column for TYPE to further categorize the existing products on eBay since there is no deeper category structure and no item specifics. This helps me when I want to understand pricing and margins for the products I want to bring into my store. This also helps me understand the product mix that is out in market.
Evaluating your white or private label idea is a process, but that extra little bit of work could save you thousands of dollars later. Best of luck with your white and private label endeavours and if you have any other questions or need any help or guidance – come chat with us.