Product Research
One key to selling any product online or offline, one eBay or anywhere else is doing the proper research on your product ideas. When you sell on eBay there are fees associate with selling, so the better prepared you are to sell a product the better you will be. There are two good ways to research products for eBay.
www.terapeak.com This site has a free tool that you will find in the navigation bar at the top of the page. When you click on it, the program will allow you to type your product idea in the search box and it will give you some results on the item.
Completed listings. Use the completed listing sections on eBay to research product ideas. This can be done by searching for your product. Once results come up on the screen you will see an option on the lower left hand corner of the screen. The option there will be titled completed listings. From there you can search the completed listings section to get an idea on well your product idea might be selling.
Product sourcing One of the biggest challenges when selling on eBay is finding what to sell and where to get it. There are several ways you can go about finding products. Here are a few.
• Garage sells and Estate sells: By attending local garage sells you can find merchandise to sell. Most of the time you can get items from garage sells at a good price. Spend some time at local garage sells and keep your eyes open for quality products that you can get for a good price. Also attend estate sells for products.
• Storage unit auctions: Storage unit auctions are another great product sourcing idea. Ads are placed in newspapers of these auctions that are typically held once a month. When someone rents a storage unit but doesn’t pay the rent, the company has the option to auction off the contents in the storage unit in order to collect the funds to pay the rent. You can attend these auctions and buy whole storage units full of products to sell on eBay.
• Consignment: I am sure a lot of you are familiar with pawn shops. Another excellent way to product source is through consignment. Consignment is the process of selling items for other people. When another store has the products that they are trying to sell, approach them about selling there products on eBay for a percentage of the sale. A lot of pawn shops get items in the store they may not be able to sell. Often times you can take pictures of those items and list on eBay and take percentage of the price they sell for. Research is a must before you sell anything on consignment.
• Bulk wholesale: If you have some capital and some space, bulk wholesaling would be another great way to get products to sell. Typically when you buy items in bulk you will get a better wholesale price, therefore increasing your profit margins. Below you will find some site you can use to find bulk wholesalers.
• Drop shipping: Finally there is drop shipping. This is probably the most preferred way to find products to sell on eBay. Drop shipping is where the supplier ships the product to your customer for you. It prevents you from having to buy any product up front and having to warehouse and ship the item. The supplier will do all that for you. It is the easiest way to sell but research is a must with this also. It can be very challenging to find a product that has a profit margin that is being drop shipped so make sure to do research before you go to the trouble of finding a drop shipper and selling the items on eBay.
Product Referral: There are several website out there you can use to help you product source. Here are some of the best ones we know of.
Thomas Register: www.thomasnet.com is a site you can use to find manufactures of certain products. When you get to this site you can use the search box at the top to find companies that in one way or another associated with the product you searched for. Most of these companies you will find are manufactures and require some contacting and negotiating to set up drop shipping accounts.
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