Topic: 5 Easy Steps to Increase Your eBay Profits Using Marketplace Research
Host: Denise, Product Manager, and Matt, Customer Support Manager, from Terapeak
Date: Tuesday, June 23rd
Time: 11AM-Noon PST
Location: eBay Workshop Board
Description: In this workshop, we'll look at 5 easy steps you can take to increase the values of your eBay sales, all using Terapeak's market research for eBay. We'll review some free and subscription tools from Terapeak that will help you gain a better understanding of the eBay marketplace, develop new ways of understanding your business, and increase your profit! After the material is presented we'll open the board for discussion and questions.
Visit http://certifiedprovider.ebay.com/ to learn more about eBay Certified Providers and the services and solutions they offer to help eBay sellers.
I’m going to post slides, and you’ll (hopefully) follow along and read them. Once they are posted, Matt and I will be back here at 11-noon PST ON TUESDAY, JUNE 23 to answer any questions you may have about the workshop materials. No question is too small or difficult, so please feel welcome to participate!
Note that all pictures and graphs featured in our workshop today are screen captures from our site, Terapeak.com. Terapeak Marketplace Research is an eBay Certified Provider and participant in the upcoming Selling Manager Applications program, which means that soon you’ll be able to use Terapeak directly on the eBay platform!
Demand and supply can change quickly in the online marketplace, so as a seller you need to know what your inventory is worth. Drop-off stores use Terapeak to educate clients on what their item’s potential value is before they even list the sale, and it’s wise for you to do the same.
Perhaps you’re considering adding new inventory or cashing in on a garage sale find? Check your item out on Terapeak before you make your first move.
For example, say you find some STAR WARS LEGO. A simple Terapeak search would bring up the following:
Terapeak’s metrics will tell you that thousands of dollars (actually, to be more specific, more than $2 million USD) of STAR WARS LEGO have sold on eBay over the past three months. So it looks like there are collectors for this item! If you’ve made a find like this, you can skip right to Step 2… Otherwise, here’s another example:
Considering adding inventory?
Searching the keywords WORM COMPOSTER results in an average price of $81.48.
If this is an item you’re sourcing from a wholesaler, you can use the search report to determine average value, and what the higher value items are. In this report, the composters with FREE WORMS sell for an average of $97.78… so that might be something you want to consider adding to your offering. (Also, ew… worms?)
You’ve established the projected value of your item, but what about your chance of actually selling that item? Before acquiring new inventory to sell, this is another important metric to review. For example, a live listings search on eBay may tell you that there are 115 FAROUK HAIR STRAIGHTENERS listed. Most seem to float around $80-110 as BIN listings.
So should you simply list these for $90 as BIN and see what happens?
No, it’s best to look at the sales metrics first!
Above, we can see that the average sold price is roughly $63, and 65% of the listings have sold. What this means is if your pricing is set around average, the chance of sale is quite good. However, if you’re listing BIN and wondering why you have products sitting…you may want to do a bit of research to see if you’re over-pricing!
“Sell-through” is a term that means the percentage of listings sold over those that are listed (eg. If 5 out of 10 listings sell, that’s a 50% sell-through rate). Personally, I like sell-through rates to be at least 50%... But 30% or under? That’s not a great market!
So, with this information, here are a few questions you may want to ask yourself:
1) Can I source stock to sell at a profit with a $63 price point? 2) Is a 65% sell-through rate a number I am comfortable with? 3) Can I learn from other listings and make my own worth more? (see STEP 3)
STEP THREE: Make your listings work harder – and make more money
Researching closed listings gives you the benefit of other seller’s experiences. As a seller you make choices not only in what to sell on eBay, but in how to create your listings as well. Does your item better suit an auction listing or a BIN (Buy It Now) situation? What listing features are worth adding to your listing, and which are better left out?
A search report on items you plan on listing will help guide you through creation of a listing that works hard…and makes more money.
When building a listing, let’s look at what sort of listing makes more money. Here’s an example report from a WILTON CAKE PAN search.
We can see that many more of these pans are listed as Bid Auctions, but that the average end price is relatively low ($10.81 is average). The Fixed Price and Store listings are both worth more, with Fixed Price coming in highest at $15.75. You’ll notice that the sell-through rate (chance of sale) is similar as well, so when you’re looking at what sort of listing, which would you choose for this item?
Another helpful aspect to research is the top sellers within your product report. In this example, there are some rare pans that are fetching huge money. Do you have any of these in stock?
Some rare WILTON CAKE PANS are selling for more than $100. These are items you might pick up for pocket change at a garage sale – another reason to watch the prices on eBay!
I’m going to return to the kitchen composter example, since I’m enjoying the green-ness and environmentally friendliness and all that…
(Sorry…)
There are lots of add-ons and upgrades available for your eBay listings: Feature listing, Feature Plus listing, Feature Super Duper listing…okay, before you write me emails, I know, that last one I made up. My point here is that there is no end to ways you can spend money on your listings. The trick to maximizing your profit margin is to spend money where you are going to make money.
By evaluating other listings, you can determine listing add-ons that are valuable, and leave the listing add-ons that won’t improve your chance of sale for someone not doing research.
Above, you can see that the Featured Plus listing sold, but was used only once (out of over 2,500 listings) – though it does remain an option. The Multi-listed option (more than one category) had a high sell-through, and the Reserve listings also surpassed a 50% sell-through rate. Even the No Feature listings had a decent sell-through of 43%, so depending on how high you like to see that sell-through, you may choose to use minimal listing features.
Is the Featured Plus listing a guarantee? With only one instance, I couldn’t say so. Still, if you have a listing with a lot of items, you may wish to go with a Feature…
Keywords are super important on eBay because that is how most buyers are going to find your listing. If you don’t have effective keywords in your listing, people simply aren’t going to find your item.
For example, and without shining lights in corners, say you’re searching for a pair of shoes. You are probably not going to search for “black shoes” in the search bar. Even worse, you’re probably not going to enter “comfortable shoes”, but instead something like “black heels sz 36” – personally, I might even add a brand name in my search.
I see so much wasted opportunity in listing titles in an average day exploring eBay, it kills me… You have 55 characters, so use them up!
With Terapeak, you have two reports that will help you built better titles:
ONE REPORT (THE FIRST ONE)
This is the keyword report from a “composter” search (yes, I’m back there again. And you know what? As soon as I finish writing this workshop, I’m going to order one for myself). These are the top recurrent words from your search. Pick the ones appropriate to your item (no keyword spamming!) and get them in your listing title.
SECOND REPORT
Terapeak also has a feature called TITLE BUILDER. This is a tool that automatically generates a list of the top recurrent keywords associated with the word you enter. Let’s look at a report for COMPOSTER:
As I add words to the keyword bar, my results will be reshuffled to help build my title:
(I chose to add “WORM”, for the record.)
You can use the Title Builder to count down your characters and suggest the best keywords. The idea is to use words people are searching, not words you would use to market the product (those might be better left to your item description area).
ADDITIONAL SECRET THIRD KEYWORD TOOL
I forgot, there’s another way to get great keywords, and it’s based off of the eBay Pulse reporting. This is a report that looks at searches eBay visitors are making. Under Hot Searches in your Terapeak account you will be able to enter a keyword; perhaps it is “shoe”…
… Or “composter”!
Upon doing so, you’ll receive a report like this:
The results are some great keywords that are pre-qualified, because they are what actual real-live eBay shoppers are searching for.
With the above report, please keep in mind that this is part of the Hot Package add-on for Terapeak, and isn’t included in the regular subscription. But, for dollars a month, if you are looking for hot products, keywords, or even titles, it’s worth it.
(Perhaps we’ll come back with another workshop for that, since now we’re out of steps!)
SO, this is just the very tip of the Terapeak Marketplace Research iceberg*, but these are five starter steps that you can apply to your listings to improve your profits.
Terapeak can also help you study your competitors’ sales, view category trends over 2 years, and find hot products to sell on eBay.
We’ve posted this early, and will return at 11 am PST – noon Tuesday, June 23 to answer your questions! Please join us then!
A note from our Legal Department: The statements and opinions made in this discussion board are those of the workshop host only and do not reflect eBay policy or eBay's opinion with respect to such statements.
The workshop is open! Take advantage of this great opportunity to ask Denise and Matt from Terapeak, questions on how Terapeak and market research help eBay sellers increase profits!
If you are a current subscriber to Terapeak, or a seller interested in how to maximize your eBay sales with market research, then this is the workshop for you!
Workshops are interactive, so please feel free to ask your questions directly relating to this topic.
The workshop board can get a little wonky as more posts are posted. You are probably on Page 2. Scroll up to the top of the workshop and you'll see an option to go to Page 1.
I recommend you start your research with products that you're interested in personally. If you like to go camping, start with tents and other outdoor recreation products... these will be the products you know the most about already.
We also have tools that highlight categories with increasing demand and products that have a consistently high success rate. The support team would be happy to help you learn more about this type of research too.
Since you can cancel at any time, you can subscribe for whatever period of time you like.
How item specific does Terapeak get. For instance, I sell Baby Clothes would it not only give me the brand but also the sizes and type of clothing such as dress shirt pants etc.?
Tools like "Top Titles" will show you what listings have been posted most frequently in a category, or from a particular seller, and the results are ranked by sales, so you can tell how much business that product is generating. That's one way to look at the data on a product level.
You can also research popular brands using keyword research and the Hot Searches tool, which tells you what words people search for most often (brands appear a lot in those results).
Great questions, please let us know if you have more
What sort of relationship? Best Match is eBay technology, but you could use Terapeak reporting to help improve your listings for Best Match. They are however not dating, despite what the tabloids have told you
Use your Seller Dashboard to help determine/monitor your progress as an eBay seller. The Seller Dashboard will report on your Detail Seller Ratings (DSRs) and give you an idea of your search ranking.
The reports reference ebay's sales and listings from the last 90 days and up to 2 years for category sales. We've built lots of tools to focus on different parts of the data, and its a lot to explain in one post...
Did you have a specific question about the research? Thanks for your question.
It would benefit you to be specific. I would definitely search brand and style for the closest results - that will give you the most accurate average pricing, etc. You could then add sizing, etc if you get too many results.
If you are looking for seasonality or trending, then i would review categories.
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