eBay Business – How to Sell on eBay to Make Money

This video explains how to find products to sell on eBay that will make you money and how to develop winning sales strategy using eBay market research software Terapeak. (This is HD video so you can watch it fullscreen if you want and turn on captions/subtitles by clicking small cc button)

Watch on YouTube: eBay Business – How to Sell on eBay to Make Money | Visit Terapeak official website

After watching the video you will learn:

• How to build your eBay business on solid facts and proven strategies that is guaranteed to make you money
• How to find emerging hot products to sell on eBay
• Discover what to sell and how to sell on eBay to boost your profits 25%-50%
• How to sell more products more often
• How to piggyback off your competitors to make more money from every auction

10 MUST Have for Profitable eBay Business

In order to have profitable eBay business you need:

• Right product

Pick right product that will sell and will make you profit – if you choose a product with tiny profit margin that few people want to buy, how do you expect to make money selling it on a regular basis?

• Product you can get at wholesale price

Pick a product that you can get at wholesale price – yes, you might think that iPad is a HOT product to sell on eBay but you can’t get it at wholesale price unless you can afford to spend several hundred thousand dollars on inventory, so iPad is NOT HOT product for your business.

• Great sales copy and description

Great sales copy and description – what features and benefits are important and will trigger people to bid and buy from you, should you offer free shipping, alternative payment options, money back guarantee?

• Right timing

Right day and time to start and end auction, when maximum amount of buyers spend the most

• Right category

Right category to get maximum amount of traffic/visitors

• Right starting price

Most profitable price to start so you cut down your eBay fees, but not the profit

• Right keywords

Right keywords and phrases buyers use to search, because if they can’t find your listings, they can’t bid on them

• Competition

How many serious players are there in your market and how big is your market, are you competing with hundreds of sellers with established customer base or is it just few occasional ones and you can easily be the TOP seller in the category?

• Listing features

What listing features are worth paying to get more attention, and what features is waste of money?

• How much you can make

How much money can you make selling a product? At the end of the day everything that matters is how much money you can put in your pocket so you can buy yourself or the loved ones nice and shiny things.

These are the questions you need to answer if you want make serious money on eBay and you can’t answer them without eBay research. There are several tools for eBay market research. I use Terapeak because it is simple and the most powerful one. Here is how to use Terapeak for eBay research to make more money.

3 Ways to Find Products to Sell on eBay

A lot of times you simply need new ideas of what products to sell and don’t know what is going to sell well and exact makes and models that will make you most of the money. But if you have general idea of what you want to sell, Terapeak makes it easy to find profitable products if you have no idea on where to look for particular product check out Worldwide Brands wholesale directory as your product sourcing solution. Another option is to check online liquidation sites and online shopping clubs where you can buy products with a good discount and then resell them on eBay. There are several ways to find good products to sell using Terapeak.

Option #1 – Hot Categories

Find hot products to sell on eBay using Terapeak Hot Categories & Top Titles report

Way back before I started doing eBay research I bought bunch of imitation jewelry on one of the liquidation sites it was a huge box with 1800 pieces I thought that I would make ton of money selling it; long story short I was able to sell only 5 pieces because 95% of my auctions closed without a sale so I end up giving out all the necklaces, earrings and bracelets to my girlfriends.

Here is how to find emerging hot products to sell on eBay without getting in the trap of buying products that you can’t sell.

Let’s say, you have found wholesaler or drop shipper with good prices on “outdoor cooking equipment” and you want to find good product within that category to sell. Terapeak has category heatmap where they rank eBay categories by profitability, in other words what categories have the highest sales.

Right now we’re in “Yard, Garden & Outdoor Living” category and you can see that “Gas Grills” has had high volume of sales for the last 30 days, which makes sense – it is the beginning of the summer, a lot of people are camping and cooking outdoor, they are buying grills and accessories, which translates into opportunity to make money by selling them.

Now we need to identify profitable items within “Gas Grills” category, it can be easily done by researching “Top Titles”. Top titles section shows products that has been successfully selling within selected category, I have sorted top titles by “Total sales”, when you’re trying to choose profitable products to sell, you should look for products that have a lot of sales, decent number of listings and high sell-through.

From the “Top Titles” sections you can see exact brands and models that are selling well within the marketplace and adjust your product sourcing strategy, so you don’t waste your time and money trying to sell something that people are not buying.

Option #2 – Top Sellers

Research & follow sales strategy of the most successful eBay sellers using Terapeak “Top Sellers” report

It is much easier and lucrative to follow lead of success then to invent failure. Terapeak makes it easy to research and reverse-engineer sales strategy of the most successful sellers in any niche or category. By researching top sellers in your category you could easily discover most profitable products to sell or find ideas for new products to sell that you haven’t thought of before. Now, instead of blindly buying a truckload of random stuff, you know exactly which products are going to bring you a profit.

Right now we’re looking at “Top Sellers” for “Gas Grills” category. Researching particular seller you have 3 options:

• Research items for this seller from this category – this option is good for observing their overall sales strategy in particular category
• Research all items for this seller – good for discovering new products to sell
• Research this seller’s top titles – grab their most successful titles (they have done all the hard work of testing the marketplace for you), now you can pick the most profitable ones

By researching top sellers in your category you can also measure potential competition and estimate your chances to compete. It might be easy to take the top seller spot in the category if all you have to compete with is a couple casual sellers and it might be not so easy if you have to deal with hordes of competitors selling hundreds of thousands worth of inventory.

When deciding between categories you should be considering category profit potential vs. number of serious sellers, in other words, how much money people are spending in this category vs. how many serious sellers are selling in this category. Let’s say you have found that “Gas Grills” and “Coolers & Ice Chests” are both hot within “Outdoor Cooking & Eating” category, so should you be selling grills or coolers?

We can’t answer this question straight away unless we know how much money people are spending in those categories and how many serious sellers there are. We can research serious players by looking at “Top Sellers” list sorted by total sales – look for those that have a lot of sales and high number of listings (20 or more a month).

There are about 20 serious sellers in “Gas Grills” category and about 15 in “Coolers & Ice Chests” category. Now it’s time to see how much money people are spending in those categories; we can do this by looking at “Total Sales” trend. Category trends allow you to see sales fluctuations in different times of the year (seasonality of your items). For both coolers and grills peak season is summer, so during the summer average weekly sales for coolers are around 12K and for grills around 120K. Both categories have roughly the same competition but people are spending 10 times more on grills then they do on coolers, so your business would have much more earning potential selling grills.

A lot of merchandise has seasonal trends, which means their sales fluctuate throughout the year like wedding favors, St. Valentines cards, barbeque grills and so on. You can buy them dirt cheap off-season and sell at much higher price during the season. Terapeak trends give insights on when is the best time to buy seasonal items off-season so you can profit selling them during the season. In our example, week before New Year is a good time to buy grills because average sales price drops down to $161 and then during the season average sales price climbs back to $320 range. Which give you enough room to have healthy profit.

Option #3 – Hot Research Module

Research profitable products with Terapeak “Hot research” module

If you don’t have particular category for selling in mind and you don’t feel like researching different brands and models, you can get ideas for profitable products to sell from Terapeak “Hot Research” module.

“Hot Categories” is a good way to identify categories which have recently experienced a significant rise in demand, which means that people are actively spending money there right now. By browsing through “Hot Categories” list it is easy to discover highly profitable niches with very little competition. As you can see “Backpack Leaf Blowers” is listed as very hot category with high success rate which means that majority of listings in this category are successful. If we go look at the sales trend for this category, we can see that weekly sales are about 40K during the autumn season and by researching top sellers we can see that there are only 7 sellers that are selling on a regular basis right now. This translates into money making opportunity because our research shows us that demand is high while supply is low.

“Hot products” tab lists groups of similar listings which have been selling at a high success rate recently; it is another way to discover hot selling products but when looking at hot products list I would suggest narrow you search down to a category, because if you search across all categories, products that are listed at the top are hard to find at wholesale price as you can see items listed at the top are mostly consumer electronics and computers. But, if you drill down to less competitive category, it is much easier to find dropshiper or wholesaler that will be glad to supply you with products to sell.

“Hot Titles” tab lists the products which have been sold most successfully on the eBay marketplace within selected period. Again, it makes sense to drill down to a less competitive category because it is easier to find wholesale suppliers for those products.

Now that you know how to choose profitable products here is how to make more money selling them. To maximize revenue from an auction you need: right category and keywords, best time to start and end your auction, compelling sales copy and description, most beneficial price to start your auction.

How to Make More Money From Every Auction

Maximize earnings from every eBay auction using historic data from Terapeak

To answer all these questions you can use standard “Search” function within Terapeak and use information widgets to see how to list your auction to pocket maximum amount possible. For any given search Terapeak gives you information how to list your auctions to achieve your goals. You can choose to maximize your average selling price and profits on every auction or you can choose to maximize your sell-through rate and number of items you sell or you can choose a hybrid strategy and try to maximize both: average selling price and sell-through. Terapeak makes it easy to switch between those goals just click a button and it will show you what settings you need to achieve your goal.

For example if I would sell “Burton snowboards” to maximize my average selling price I would need to list my auction for 10 days with the starting price of $39.51 and end my auction on Saturday between 1-2am.

If my goal was to maximize sell-through I would need to list my auction for 11 days with starting price of $39.51 and end my auction on Tuesday between 6-7pm and use of keyword 2011 would help me sell more items.

There is another way to research options that will help you make more money on every auction – it is “Top Sellers” report. After you pick a product or category in which you want to sell, research top sellers, if they’re selling more than anybody else in this category, they must be doing something right so why not adopt best parts from their selling strategy – research what they are selling, what keywords and features they use and so on… Look for sellers with high volume of sales and high sell-through, research several top sellers, pick and combine best parts from their selling strategy.

If your auction and product description is poor you will get poor sales, to prevent this from happening use links to closed listings at the bottom of every Terapeak search – pick 5-10 auctions with highest sale price – obvious winners, then research their sales copy, take the best, improve it, and you got the best sales copy than anybody.  It works every time.

How to Research Profit Potential of a Product

Research profit potential before selling a product

So, by now you should have an idea of a product that you want to sell. Although you are confident you can sell it, do you know how much money you can make? Terapeak can help us answer this question – check Average End Price –   this is how much money average seller can expect to make selling the product. But we won’t sell it at the average: using market research and proper selling strategy we can significantly boost our selling price. Usually my selling price was 25% higher (on average) than regular end price, because I was able to leverage great description, right timing, keywords and features in my auctions.

Here is how to find out how much money you can make selling a product:

Profit per item = End Price – Cost of a Product.

Don’t forget to include in Cost of a Product:  wholesale price of a product + shipping + storage + listing and closing fees. So, if your average End price is $100 and it cost you $78 to get and list the product, your average profit per item would be $22.

To decide whatever or not you can build a business selling this product you need to calculate profit potential over time:

Profit Over Time = Profit per item * # of listings * sell-through

So, if you’re listing 100 items per month, your profit per item is $22 and sell-through rate is 70% you can expect to make $1540 per month.

$22*100*70%=$1540

The key here is to sit down and do the math before you’re going to buy a large inventory of “hot” products that either:

• You can’t sell
• You can’t make a profit on.

That’s why market research is crucial “MUST” for serious business, and performing this without proper market research software is impossible. So, if you’re selling or planning to sell more than $500 a month worth of products you need eBay market research software, otherwise you’re leaving a lot of money on the table and possibly wasting your time trying to have eBay business.

For full textual review of Terapeak and more tips and strategies about eBay research please click button below.

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