One of the hardest things that you will have to do to get your home eBay business going is to find items to actually sell. While you can sell just about anything you can imagine on eBay, choosing a popular item that shows consistent success on auction sites will guarantee you steady success. The problem is that without the proper research, you don't know what the popular items are! To find out what you should be selling on eBay, use eBay.
One of the hardest things that you will have to do to get your home eBay business going is to find items to actually sell. While you can sell just about anything you can imagine on eBay, choosing a popular item that shows consistent success on auction sites will guarantee you steady success. The problem is that without the proper research, you don't know what the popular items are! To find out what you should be selling on eBay, the best tool to use is eBay itself. Using eBay, you can easily narrow down your options with accurate and current statistics on what is popular with buyers.
The easiest way to get started on your research is by going through eBay by category. Find the advanced search options and look at each category that eBay has listed for selling. Choose a category that interests you, and you will see a list of every auction in that category. You can do one of two things once you have narrowed down a category.
Organize the listings by the highest bid. You can see what items are fetching the highest price on eBay in real time. These items are likely what you want to focus on selling if you want to make a large profit. Once you have a good list of some top-priced items, you can find where to get these items at a discounted price for reselling. Make note of what the starting bid for each item is, what the lowest priced auction is going for, and what the highest priced auction is going for. Your average sale price will be somewhere in between these numbers.
You should also check out the sidebar for the category listings on eBay. You will see a header listing the hot items for that category of the moment. These are also items you may want to focus in on for selling purposes. Go through these items to get a rough idea of what they sell for, and what the average starting bids are from current sellers.
Another way to find the hottest selling items on eBay is by visiting eBay's popular search terms. You can find these by visiting: http://popular.ebay.com/. This will show you the most popular searches of the moment for each category. Click on a search term under a category, and you can see what kind of items are currently being sold, and what their current going price is.
Some websites offer you a service of finding this information for you, but want to charge you an arm and a leg for the information. Don't fall for it; the information you'll pay for is no different than the information you can find yourself with just a few minutes of research. Plus, when you do the research yourself, you can be guaranteed that you are getting the most accurate and up to date statistics on what's popular on eBay right now. Stick to selling these popular items at a slightly lower starting price, and your eBay business will be taking off in no time!
Using Marketing Techniques to Make More Money on eBay
Marketing is the foundation of a good business. If customers do not know who you are or where to find you, they cannot purchase your products (regardless of how good those products may be). Creative marketing can create buzz about your store and have a very positive impact on your business.
How to Customize Your eBay Store
Once you have an official eBay store up and running, you will most likely see an increase in both traffic and business. As this happens, you will probably want to customize your store to reflect your own personality and business style (but remember, keeping the store looking clean, polished, and professional trumps all else). Fortunately, altering and customizing your store is very easy.
About Me Page Boosts Your eBay Business
Advertising is extremely important, especially when you are just starting a business. Buying ad space or starting a marketing campaign are certainly good options to getting your name out there, but there are also inexpensive and less time consuming ways to let people know about your eBay store. One of these methods is writing an About Me page.
