With over 170million active buyers on eBay each quarter, it’s a busy marketplace bursting with opportunity. But, how do you know what to sell? With tens of thousands of categories, where do you even start?
Let’s get warmed up by getting your head around what is already selling well on eBay, the world’s largest marketplace.
Run a Top 500 Live Listings report for a level 2 category.
Don’t select the top level category - for example, Health & Beauty or Sport Goods. That range is far too huge to be narrowed down.
Select the next level category, Level 2 or Level 3. So for example, with Health & Beauty, you might choose the Makeup subcategory. Or in Sporting Goods, you might select Fishing, or another sport listed there.
The resulting Top 500 Live Listings report will literally rank products from 1 to 500 for that category. At the top of the list are the products that have had the most customer engagement in that category for that moment in time. Although this is not a definitive list, this is a great way to get some direction on the type of products that are currently attracting buyer engagement, but remember millions of shoppers are on eBay at any given time, so behaviours and preferences an change.
Keep browsing through the categories and running reports. You could stumble upon a a product or a category that you did not realise that there is a market for on eBay. With over 45,000 categories, there are niches everywhere to be found!
Ever thought of selling religious products? Well, they’re there. Food items? There is a strong trade for hard to find organic foods, coffees and teas. Got a fleet of excavators or tractors? It’s not unheard of - check out the video in this guide, it’s…earth moving!
If you’re already selling on eBay, the logical next step is to expand into complimentary categories or innovate on the product that you specialise in.
If you are an upstart seller – the key to know what to sell is to sell what you love or know well. That passion will resonate through the way you present your product and attract the buyer who appreciates your offering. A buyer can tell the difference.
Follow a hunch and run as many reports as you need.
If you see something interesting that seems to resonate, run another Top 500 Live Listings report with more specific keywords for that product. Keep running reports, refining your keywords each time until you land on a product that you feel could be worth the time to explore opportunities.
With a Free Basic account you can run up to 250 reports a month. That’s a lot. With a Premium account you can run 750!! Both accounts offer a long runway to follow that string to find out where it ends up.
As you run reports, keep watch of these stats as part of your opportunity assessment:
1. Sellers – is there a high amount of seller participation? Is there a lot of competition? Or is it a really consolidated category where only one or two sellers dominate the Top 500?
2. Brands – is it represented by a lot of known brands? Is there a lot of unbranded? Do you see a lot of white labelling activity happening?
If you’ve identified a market dominant seller and you are a Premium account holder, go ahead and run the keywords with that seller’s id. You will see their range and maybe pick up a bit of inspiration from what they are carrying in their line.
Assess opportunity with ShelfTrend’s other reports. Assuming you’ve honed into a product you might want to sell online, use the same product keywords and run ShelfTrend’s other reports for a different perspective on potential commercial viability.
Use the New Listings Report to see new inventory that has been loaded onto the eBay marketplace over the last 7 days. You never know, someone with the same idea could have gotten there first and flooded the market with the product you were just about to invest in! OR if you’re lucky and it’s all pretty quiet. You could be first to market and dominate!
Run the Average Weekly Sales Report. At ShelfTrend we’ve done the hard work and analyzed thousands of product listings with past sales to assess how active the market is, and the sort of weekly sales you could expect to see.
Really explore the data. Search and sort the data. Work with the graphs and flip through the category’s filter for your product.
You could uncover a niche within a niche. For example, if you think your opportunity product is Peppermint oil, by flipping through the categories you could discover that it is a really strong seller in the organic foods section, in the household cleaning category AND right about now, it is really hot in the jewellery category, sold with a beautiful crystal necklace that emits the immune boosting and therapeutically benefits to its owner.
Finally, run your product keywords with the Supply Demand Report.
Click through right away to the data visualization.
Charted across the horizontal axis is the price distribution of the products currently available to your customer. What you could find is that there is an awful lot of inventory in the lower price ranges on eBay. This is standard eBay faire. But not that much inventory in the mid and higher priced tiers.
Plotted on top of the price distribution bar chart are the proofs of sales. These dot represent actual products and their weekly sales. Usually sales are heavily skewed toward the lower price ranges, but opportunity is never far away. In much of our analysis, you may also find strong indication for demand in mid-priced or even higher priced products where there is hardly any inventory selection.
You need to spend some time picking through what makes a particular price range interesting. Maybe its a difference of quality, country of origin or a more desirable product feature. What you could uncover by examining the Supply Demand graph are product variations or features that could be showing an emerging market trend.
For example, if your opportunity product is Ugg Boots, looking through the data, you could identify that there is something about colour dyed ugg boots in the mid-tier prices that are showing great promise for higher sales than the standard Ugg.
Working out what to sell – whether it is to start selling or to expand your already existing eBay business - is not an easy bit of analysis. There are a lot of things to consider. This is where ShelfTrend comes in. ShelfTrend’s reports are designed to cut through and give you a different perspective of market opportunities and hopefully give you enough insights and confidence to boldly invest in that product that could one day be the main revenue driver for your business.