Six rules of successful product selection and selling
For a person who has just started selling on eBay it can seem confusing how to begin. Nevertheless, it will be much helpful to orient to those people who have an obvious success in this sphere. Without any doubt, it will be useful to adopt some winning techniques of these successful entrepreneurs, to learn their lessons, so to say. Here I’d like to present six techniques for you: study and learn them, and then you will be a prosperous online retailer.
Identify Emerging Markets
First of all, you should identify emerging markets. An emerging market is a market where the bid rate is growing at a greater rate than the listing rate. While a hot market has reached its capacity, an emerging market has room for growth. You will be aware of what people sell and what customers need. The rule is not to chase after hot-ticket products with saturated markets. You should search for neglected niche markets where demand is greater than supply. Turn to Andale.com and Hammertap.com – two good research market tools which can show you this information.
Look at Your Competition
The second rule is to look at your competition. You are to identify who are your rivals and how they reached the top. You even can borrow some of their most successful techniques, but don’t copy all the tactics. While borrowing be sure that the primary idea is yours and don’t forget add something specially yours in order to distinguish yourself. You are to be unique to build your own niche market and create your loyal customers.
Set Your Prices
The technique number three consists of looking at your competition’s prices. Thus, you will make it possible to set your own prices. Also use market research tools – they can give you the item’s average selling price and moreover they will show you the factors that can influence the prices. The tools also interpret the data for you and show you how to get the most from your item: for instance, the best day and time to end an auction, which listing features draw the highest bids and so on.
Know Your Seasons
In order to sale well, you should know the right season for proposing right products. Remember that everything is good in its season. If you know products’ seasons, you’ll know the best time to list them. If it is right season, you can sell products immediately. If the season hasn’t come, it is right time to stock the product. You can stock it up now and sale it later on, when you will be sure that you will get the most of the product.
Create Effective Titles
Titles are the face of the product, so by choosing creative and original ones you will provide a certain attention to your product. By words you specify your market and help optimize a search engine. If you don’t want to be lost in the crowd, but on the contrary, you are eager to get to the top, use special tools for making up effective titles. Try Terapeak.com – the tool designed to help you create optimal titles for your merchandise based on eBay data.
Keep Records
And the last but not the least, you should keep records and analyze them. Study why some products emerge only for some time, and some trends are afloat from season to season. Analyze not only the latest sales results, look from year to year. Mind that your business requires long term thinking, not just day to day. Studying a longer period of time will give you an opportunity to gain a better understanding of how trends and seasons affect your market.