Most internet users today have heard of EBay and that it is a site for people to sell items. It does not matter if you are simply selling an item once in awhile or if you have developed an EBay storefront and your primary source of income derives from EBay. That is one of the beauties of EBay is that most anyone has the ability to list an item on the website. Unfortunately, the items themselves will play a major role in a successful sale.
For the past couple of months I have been looking into internet marketing / sales in doing so an area of focus is on EBay. I have talked to various individuals that conduct classes on how to sell items using the EBay platform and while the majority of the classes are dedicated to how a seller develops their auction page – which is a worthwhile concept and is important – when it comes to determining if your product is a viable item on EBay – the seller needs to perform their own research.
Like any market, EBay has a particular customer base – and yes it is a large customer base thanks to the internet – yet it is still a particular customer base. Now if you are just selling items every so often EBay is a perfect place to sell something, if you are attempting to sell items for a continual source of income – you need to look into niche marketing with a focus on EBay. For more information about Niche Marketing please see the links at the end of the article.
If you are looking into selling items on a continuing basis there are tools available to assist in research, and a simple search “EBay research tools” will bring up various results. One simple search I recently performed was on “Nike Shoes”. Compiling data for the past 45 days I noticed there were 500 listings for the shoe with 183 sales, or a 37% sales rate. Increasing the search to contain 2000 listings produced 831 sales, or a 41% sales rate. Performing this same search using data from one year ago I noticed 500 listing produced 223 sales, or 44% sales rate and 2000 listings produced 968 sales, or 48% sales rate.
While I am not surprised to see a small decline in the sales rate from one year to the next, if you were attempting to sell Nike shoes on EBay in today’s market; 37 – 41% sales rate appears fairly low and with the other competitors on EBay, ones profit margin will not be that large. Perhaps a better item to sell is coins. A simple search of the keyword “coin”; looking at the same search criteria; results in a sales rate between 55 – 60%; a 20% increase in sales. Of course you can still sell Nike shoes, or many other items on EBay, but look at the success rates of items compared to others to see which products work best in EBay’s market environment.
More information on niche marketing you can view my previous posts, Niche Marketing and Supplier for your Niche Market. You can also view the Wikipedia entry on Niche market here.