Welcome and thanks for joining us this afternoon!

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


Cheers,

Deirdre
eBay Community Development

hello, I am new to this discussion, although I was at yesterdays discussion with Chris Malta. I am starting up an ebay store soon but before i do I need to know what is products are good sellers and so that's why I'm here.

Profit Opportunity

To be successful on eBay you need to find items to sell that give you the best chance of making a healthy, sustainable profit. In evaluating items to sell this begins by finding items with the greatest Profit Opportunity. The basic formula for determining the profit opportunity for any specific item is:

Success Rate x Volume x Profit Margin = Profit Opportunity

In order to explain each of these components and how you can find products with the greatest Profit Opportunity we need to understand how the eBay market fundamentally works. This begins with understanding the economic principals of Supply and Demand.

Supply and Demand

Supply and Demand determines the price of goods and the success rate of listings on eBay. This will also determine the overall Profit Opportunity for all of your listings. In the most basic terms, Supply is the number of listings there are for an item. The more listings there are, the larger the supply of the item. Demand is the number of people who want that item- you can generally use the amount of bids on an item or its overall Success Rate as a measure for how great the demand is for the item.

For example if there were 100 people selling “superWidgets” on eBay and only 3 people who wanted to buy “superWidgets” you would probably have very small Profit Margins for your “superWidget” in addition to a very low Success Rate. This situation describes low demand (i.e. low Profit Opportunity) items.

On the other side, if you were the only one selling “megaWidgets” and there was 100 people who wanted to buy “megaWidgets”, you would probably get a good Profit Margin for your listing as well as excellent Success Rate. In this scenario, megaWidgets have a low supply and a high demand,. This scenario describes a high Profit Opportunity item.

To put it simply- the items that present the best Profit Opportunity on eBay (or anywhere else for that matter) are a high demand – low supply item. As we go through this workshop you will learn the tips and tools you can use to find these kinds of items to sell on eBay.

Are you going to tell us what are good items to supply in this workshop?

Hi ennisfam We are going to get into that in a second. We wanted to cover the basics for anyone who is not familiar with these eBay tools, but we will be getting more specific here in a few minutes.

The eBay Hot Categories Report

The eBay Hot Categories Report is published every month. It is a downloadable file that lists categories where the bid to item ratios are relatively high. Looking through this list will show you where supply of goods to the eBay market is low compared to a high demand. This is a good second step to take after you check out the Pulse because the Hot Categories Report measures categories based on their growth rate.

Although, this information is useful it can still be time consuming to take the information about demand from eBay pulse and then manually search the hot list for categories that relate to some of the popular terms. To do this more efficiently we will now show you how Terapeak.com gives you more complete and specific information on what categories have the most potential for you.