eBay Auction Research

The Importance of Marketplace Research

From: Brent Crouch
Tuesday, 9:25 p.m.

Hello Friend,

How do you know what to sell when you start selling on eBay? If you want your eBay DVD business to be successful, you need to do your research. When it comes to eBay sales, not all DVDs are created equal. For instance, you may think your favorite new release would be a great seller. Unfortunately, you'd be wrong. New releases rarely pull in a profit. The margin just doesn't allow for it. If you want to know what DVDs to sell, you need to learn from the pros. To do that, you need to know what the pros are selling.

To start out your market research, check out what DVD titles the top Power Sellers are selling in their auctions. Look at their completed auctions and see how much their DVDs are selling for. Figure out how much of a profit you would make from selling those titles and make a list of the titles that would be most profitable.

After you've done your preliminary market research, you should probably take advantage of the advanced research tools eBay offers. Recently eBay released a Marketplace Research service. The cost for subscribing to this service ranges from a $2.99 fee for two-day access to a monthly fee of $24.99 for unlimited comprehensive research access. By using eBay's Marketplace Research service, you'll be able to find out the average sold price of a DVD title, the lowest price the title sold for and the highest price the title sold for. For each title you research, you'll be able to determine if the average eBay sales price is high enough to generate a worthwhile profit for you.

In addition to providing you with sales price data, eBay's Marketplace Research can show you the average shipping cost for that item. This can tell you just how much room you have to play with your shipping charges. For instance, if the average shipping price of a DVD is $5.99 and you're only charging $2.99, you would know you could safely raise your shipping fees. However, if you were charging $6.99 and the average shipping price was $3.99, you might want to rethink your shipping charges.

The monthly Marketplace Research subscriptions will provide you with more information than the two-day access. For instance, with a monthly subscription you could see not only how many certain DVDs were listed, but how many of those listed actually sold. This will give you a good picture of marketplace demand before you actually invest in the sale of that DVD.

With marketplace research, you can increase your sales, increase your profits, and minimize the amount of time and money wasted on trying to sell items there is no demand for. Once you know what people want and how much they're willing to pay for it, everything else is smooth sailing.

If you have any questions, please email me at support@jillianentertainment.com.

Sincerely,