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Member Workshop: Discover your Next Top Seller - May 04
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Last Post May 4, 2007 12:07 PM by: deirdre@ebay.com
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deirdre@ebay.com
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Member Workshop: Discover your Next Top Seller - May 04

Apr 26, 2007 10:08 PM
Topic: Member Workshop: Discover your Next Top Seller

Host: terapeak
Date: Friday 05/04
Time: 11:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. Pacific time
Location: Workshop Board

Description: Join Sara and Denise from Terapeak Marketplace Research for an interactive discussion on how Terapeak's online research tool can help you discover new and exciting markets on eBay! Not sure what to sell? With a little research you can find a niche market or discover categories that are gaining momentum on eBay. We'll look at how to use the Category Heat Map feature to explore new markets and find your next hot seller! Don't wait for products to make the industry hot lists and eBay Pulse reports, be the first one to move into new markets and maximize your profits!

Cheers,

Deirdre
eBay Community Development
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Member Workshop: Discover your Next Top Seller - May 04

May 4, 2007 10:52 AM
Welcome and thanks for joining us today!

We love workshops to be interactive, so please feel free to ask your questions that directly relate to this topic.

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Cheers,

Deirdre
eBay Community Developmen
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Member Workshop: Discover your Next Top Seller - May 04

May 4, 2007 10:53 AM
Slide One



Hello! Welcome and thank you for taking the time to join us today! We have a really cool feature of Terapeak that we’re going to share with you today. Any of the graphs we’re using are just screenshots from our website (www.terapeak.com) and you can generate similar reports on the site as easily as you would launch an internet search on Google or Yahoo search engines.

I’m going to post the content of our discussion, and once that’s up, we’d love to hear any questions, comments and ideas the information may inspire.

At the end of our workshop, we’ll post a link to a free 2 week trial of our website for those of you who are not yet subscribers so you can get in there and see how research can improve your bottom line!

Let’s get going!
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Member Workshop: Discover your Next Top Seller - May 04

May 4, 2007 10:54 AM
Slide Two

I get tonnes of emails from eBay users (and other online retailers) about how to find the top selling items on eBay. Alternately, people want to know what the big sellers are in any given category so that they can sell them. This makes sense from a certain perspective – iPods or WII consoles, for example, are selling like hotcakes – the success rate for iPod Nano 2gb MP3 players over the last 30 days on eBay was 84.4%, so there are a lot of iPods selling, but the other side of that category is that the average price was $86.99. The MSRP (manufacturer’s suggested retail price) on the Apple site is $149.00.

What can happen when a lot of sellers start selling the same “hot” item is that the market is over-saturated, and sellers under-value their goods just to make a sale. You may be able to sell a heck of a lot of iPod Nanos on eBay this month, but the profit margin may be quite low. There may be other ways to make more money with fewer listings in the same marketplace. Less saturated markets mean more opportunities for you as a seller to get maximum dollar value for your goods.

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Member Workshop: Discover your Next Top Seller - May 04

May 4, 2007 10:54 AM
Slide Three

Imagine the seller who first saw the Tickle Me Elmo doll and thought, “Wow, I bet I can sell a lot of those on eBay”. They may have seen a trend about to break as their kids grew excited over the new toy, and perhaps did a little research to see that there was no other toy on eBay that had such fun features. The seller at the start of the trend would have had maximum sales for their items. Remember those items selling for thousands?!? As other sellers joined the Elmo sales, the final dollar value of the item (and therefore the profit margin) slowly deteriorated as the marketplace became more and more saturated. The more sellers that hopped on the Elmo sales wagon, the more the market became diluted with choice and the less competition each auction garnered.

What you want to do to benefit from trends is to enter the markets when trends are breaking, not when everyone and their dog have that magic item to list.

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Member Workshop: Discover your Next Top Seller - May 04

May 4, 2007 10:54 AM
Slide Four

The Category Heat Map is a really fascinating feature on the Terapeak site.
What it does is allow you to drill through categories and see how the activity compares within different areas. You can sort the information by Total Sales, Total Listings, Total Sold Listings, Total Bids, Sell-Through Percentage, Bids per Listing, and Average Price

The feature color codes categories depending on the activity – like this:

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Member Workshop: Discover your Next Top Seller - May 04

May 4, 2007 10:54 AM
Slide Five

You can scan the first results page and easily see where the activity is. For example, look at what happens in the “Specialty Services” category when I sort the categories by Total Bids:

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Member Workshop: Discover your Next Top Seller - May 04

May 4, 2007 10:54 AM
Slide Six

This is just a small section of the entire report that you see on screen.
We can see using the color codes within the “Specialty Services” category that “Printing and Personalization” is the subcategory with the highest total bids. Where there are bids, there is demand, and this is what we’re looking for when we browse for new sales opportunities.

I can continue to drill through to the next category breakdown within Specialty Services:

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Member Workshop: Discover your Next Top Seller - May 04

May 4, 2007 10:55 AM
Slide Seven

We can see that within the category above, “Signs, Decals” have the most bids, followed by “Stationery” and “Other”. Selecting the Signs, Decals sub category we receive an even further breakdown:



We’re at the end of the breakdowns here, and our search generates a list of all the completed auctions within it. We can sort the listings by Start Price, End Price or Bids – sorting by bids can allow us to see exactly the items that are garnering so much interest on eBay!
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Member Workshop: Discover your Next Top Seller - May 04

May 4, 2007 10:55 AM
Slide Eight

This is a portion of the end of the report, which also has listing title and photos (for brevity I’ve just been using sections of screen shots!) …



…this is organized by bid rate, so we can look at the items with lots of bids, and see if there is an opening market here! I would check out those items with 20 and 30 bids on them, that’s potentially a lot of shoppers competing for an item!
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Member Workshop: Discover your Next Top Seller - May 04

May 4, 2007 10:55 AM
Slide Nine

If I wish, I can take the information I’ve gathered from my search so far, and trend the results over the last two years with a category trend.




I can certainly see there have been some big sales lately here, and that the area has been experiencing an increase lately. This is maybe an area I’ll want to learn more about.
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Member Workshop: Discover your Next Top Seller - May 04

May 4, 2007 10:55 AM
Slide Ten

I can apply this sort of combined search in any of the categories on eBay. It’s amazing the markets you can find with oodles of bidders just waiting for you to list your products!
And this is all based on the simple and time honored retailer’s concept of supply and demand!

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Member Workshop: Discover your Next Top Seller - May 04

May 4, 2007 10:55 AM
Slide Eleven

Let’s go back to our original iPod model.
Reviewing the information is really simple! Look at what we find within the Apple MP3 categories -

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Member Workshop: Discover your Next Top Seller - May 04

May 4, 2007 10:55 AM
Slide Twelve

Again, sorting my results by bid rate, I can see that within those iPods,



The highest number of bids was placed on this iPod Nano silver unit. That’s a good amount of competition, which would reveal to me a demand for that item.
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Member Workshop: Discover your Next Top Seller - May 04

May 4, 2007 10:55 AM
Slide Thirteen

That’s the end of the content of our presentation. If anyone has any questions or comments to share with the group, we’ll be here until noon for discussion.
A lot of great ideas in these workshops are generated by the group, so please “speak” up!
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