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Cheers,
Laura

In the past, you could sell almost anything on eBay and make a profit. Now things have changed. You have a lot of competition. It doesn’t mean you can’t make the same profit. It just means you need a competitive edge.

But how do you do that? Lower your prices? Offer free shipping? Double your listings? While these strategies may work, they also cut into your bottom line.

How can you be competitive and successful at the same time? Know your market and how your product sells in that market. In other words, you get the competitive edge with quick, effective market research techniques.

But who has time for research? After you learn this five-minute research recipe, all you will need is five minutes. And trust me—this is five minutes you can’t afford not to spend!

The Key to Swift Research
The key to swift, effective research is to know the questions you want to answer and to have a system for answering them. Here are a few of the questions we’ll examine today:

- How much will a product sell for?
- What are my chances of selling it?
- What listing type should I choose?
- How long should I list it?

You may not have even known you could get the answers to these questions. And you can get a whole lot more than those, too. But, these are a healthy start.

I have spent a lot of time, one-on-one, with many businesses over the past year, and you’d be surprised what a healthy face-lift the answers to these few questions gave each of them.

Ready to start?

Viola! Your Average Sales Price (ASP)



Figure 1: Average Selling Price

With just a quick glance, you know that this item made $48.49 on average. Not hard, right? Not only have you learned how to make an educated choice about whether this is a product you’d want to sell, but it’s saved you time in deliberating over your choice and looking through dozens or hundreds of listings, one at a time, to try to get the same information.

Let’s try another question.

Average Just Isn’t Good Enough
We’ve discovered great information in a very short time. Now that you know how to quickly find out what buyers want. You’re already ahead!

But, remember that our first objective when we started was to outsmart the competition. We don’t want to settle for the average, we want the competitive edge. So, we need to find out how to make our listings more successful that 62% and more profitable than $48.49.

Knowing what buyers want is only part of the strategy. To do better than average, you have to know how buyers want to buy.

Question 3: What’s the Best Listing Type for My Product?
We’re going to answer this question in two parts: what will help me increase my chances of selling, and what will help me increase my profit per sale?
What listing type will help me increase my chances of selling?



Figure 4: Best Listing Type to Increase Listing Success Rate

I took the graph above from Figure 3, so we could use it here to look at the best listing type to increase our success rate.

This is the Listing Type graph under the Listing Success Rate column. At first it looks like Dutch Auction has the highest success rate—100%! But, on a quick, closer inspection, I can see that there was only one Dutch Auction. (See the number in parentheses next to the words Dutch Auction in the graph). That’s really not enough to base a choice on.

Instead, we’ll choose regular auctions, because they have the next-highest success rate and there were lots of them (192, to be exact). The success rate is around 69%. This means that sellers with this listing type sold 8% more often. (In Figure 2, we can see that the overall average was about 61%.)

At a quick glance, you can find out that regular listings, without Buy It Now, will give you the best chances of selling.

Note: It’s important to remember that the best listing type for you will vary, depending on the product and how long it’s been since you researched. You should complete fresh, specific research each time you want an answer about your product.

Test Yourself
Okay, here’s a pop-quiz, to see how quick you are at reading market data.

Go back to Figure 3 and look at the Duration (listing length) graphs. Find out:

1. Which duration is best to increase your chances of selling (Listing Success Rate)?
2. Which duration is best to increase your profit per sale?

What did you find? How long did it take you?