Topic: Member Workshop: Using market research to sell successfully on eBay
Host: terapeak Date: Monday 04/07 Time: 11:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. Pacific time Location: Workshop Board
Description: What’s this thing worth? Spring is springing in a lot of areas, and with the milder weather comes garage sales, flea markets, etc. There’s a plethora of great deals waiting in garages and front yards across the continent that might be in demand on eBay. This workshop will show you how to determine what an item is worth on eBay and how best to sell it. Denise from Terapeak will be around for the hour to answer any questions and help with market research.
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Greetings and welcome to today’s workshop! We’ll be discussing how to determine the value of items to sell on eBay. Often at Terapeak we receive notes from our users who have found really cool items at garage sales or flea markets that they have later sold on eBay for big profit. They use Terapeak research to determine the value of the item, sometimes even before purchase (with their laptop or mobile device). Pretty cool, hey?
So today, since I’m feeling the spring time shopping season coming up, I thought we’d look at an examples of items you might find at a local sale that you can arbitrage on eBay and make lots of profit in a short amount of time.
Before we get started with the material, a quick note on what Terapeak is, and how these workshops work!
Terapeak is a web based market research tool and we are an eBay Certified Provider. Our subscription service provides access to 90 days of closed eBay listings, and two years of category trends. Terapeak can help you evaluate items, determine how and when to sell them, and even guide you to new niche markets and hot selling items.
Any of the screen shots in this workshop are taken directly from Terapeak’s web-based tool. You can visit at any time and try the free tool (which provides a limited data set) at http://terapeak.com. I’ll post a link at the end of this workshop for a 14 day free trial of the subscription site!
I’m going to post some information now, please read along and at the end we’ll open the floor for questions. I’m here until noon PST to respond to anything you’re curious about.
Let’s look at a few items you might see around a flea market or estate sale. These are items that you may not assume are worth any money at all, but are actually in big demand in the eBay marketplace.
The one I’ve checked out for today’s workshop is license plates.
You’ll often see estate sales in rural areas, and there’s lots of old junk in barns and attics – I can think of a few local barns with walls of license plates – I’m sure we’ve all seen places like this along the highway.
The trick of it is, license plates are a huge collectible business on eBay! Entering the keyword “plate” into a search of the license plate category reveals the sales that have occurred on eBay. The market is a little larger than I had initially imagined:
Over $400,000 worth of license plates have sold on eBay in the past month! A number of the top selling plates went for over a thousand dollars each – for example, a 1905 Maine plate sold for $1900!
Even a more recent plate, a 1954 Tennessee plate sold for over $400! There is a large number of plates within the report that have sold for multiple hundreds of dollars on eBay!
If we shuffle our “license plate” results by bid rate, we can look at the plates that have collected the most bids. From this we can infer more popular/in demand items. The top bid fetching plate, with 36 bids is a Corvette Museum commemorative plate. It started at $20 and closed for $455!
Porcelain license plates are rare, as they are older. We can see with a specific search for these that the average value goes up quite a bit.
We can add the word “porcelain” to our search and get a more specific set of sales data:
More than $25K of these porcelain plates have sold over the 30 day period, and the sell through rate (the percentage of items sold over the total listed) is high at 68.87%.
Another way to look at this item is to do a Category Item Browse and break down the sub-categories within Collectible License Plates. This is another feature of Terapeak that allows you to assess the category’s value through it’s sub-categories to determine where the most sales (or bids, or listings, etc) are occurring. This report produces a color coded chart – red is the highest activity and grey the lowest.
The report for the license plate category reveals the top selling sub-categories, starting with: Mixed State Lots; US: California; US: Maine; Canada; Other Countries; and so on.
So, if you see a well preserved California license plate around a sale this spring, I’d certainly be tempted to snap it up and re-sell it on eBay!
Now that we’ve found a few license plates (or whatever unique item you’ve ferreted out at a local sale), how can we use Terapeak research to best list our items on eBay?
If we go back to our report on “license plate” we can see how other sellers are listing their plates, and evaluate the success of different times to end listings and different listing features to include. All of these are details of our sale that we need to consider to maximize the value of our listing.
Research can show us the best day to end our listing. When you’re listing an item at auction, it’s important to know when your customer will be buying. You can determine that by looking at sales data. It looks like the busiest transaction day of the week is Sunday, with the 50.97% Sell-Through rate. Reviewing all the numbers, you can see that the average price is highest that day too. Listing to end on a Sunday will have your item up against the highest number of competitors however, so it may be worth it to enter on another day with less competition. If you decide to enter the largest market, it’s important to review your listing options as well.
By reviewing the Sell-Through rates of individual listing promotions, you can see the promotions you might want to add to your auction, and which might not return your investment. Since listing promotions add cost to your total fees (with the exception now of Gallery listings), it’s important to choose only the ones that will increase your items chance of sale.
The above breakdown shows the promotions used in the past 30 days.
The Highlighted listing option seems to have a very nice sell-through rate (that’s the percentage of items sold over total listed) as well as the Picture Services added listings. Subtitled and Reserve listings have less than awesome Sell-Through, so I wouldn’t add fees there.
Now that we know how we’re listing and when we’re ending our auction, how do we title our license plates for best coverage? Keyword choices are very important to your listing –you have 55 characters that will be the store front for your item. To establish the best word choice, let’s look at the Terapeak Title Builder for some ideas. The Title Builder works by assembling the next top recurring words in eBay listings when you enter a keyword. Entering PLATE into the Title Builder will automatically generate a list of keywords.
Of course it is up to us as responsible sellers to choose keywords that represent the sale item accurately, but also to choose the ones associated with highest dollar value. Since “plate” may also be included in dishware and other listings, we want to be a bit more specific. If we add “LICENSE” to our Title List – to get more of the market we’re focusing on, we’ll get a further breakdown of keywords. We can add and subtract words from that and the word list will repopulate until we’ve chosen our perfect 55 character title.
And there you have a quick run-down of how Terapeak research can help you with gems from garage and estate sales! You can search any item by keywords and determine its value and market on eBay, in very few steps!
Now, we’ll open the floor for any questions you might have on Research. Please feel free to speak up; we’re here until noon today to answer questions!
That's a totally good example! There are lots of opportunities to sell these on eBay - did you have a specific band in mind?
If you had one, we could pull an average sale price. I can see right now being a good time for vintage Rolling Stones tee shirts, as that movie has just been released!
Thank you for the great examples - seems that Faith Hill tees are not that big - not a lot of sales there - and I don't see any tees for Color Me Badd in the past 2 weeks - lots of albums though!
hey there I am new to ebay I have been in my garage looking for stuff and there is lots of stuff I found this hand painted cups & saucers by meito are they worth anything?? I have not started selling yet but will go to your site for marketing research. does china sell well???
There's a great market for china - imagine if you are a collector of that pattern and looking for extras! I'll do a quick report here - sorry i can't put up pictures, it takes awhile
We have a lot of books we will probably want to sell on eBay, some music for piano and/or violin that the wife's father wrote, several small items we're not sure if they're antique or not, two late-60s floor lamps with several conical shades and moving "arms," and a 10-foot-plus-high bookcase. The top of the bookcase is in our garage and the bottom is in our basement; it's solid walnut and extremely heavy. Do you have any recommendations about selling such things? We also have Oriental rugs, which we probably need to have a local merchant deal with(?).
Well, I would definitely go to Terapeak and search the book titles to estimate the value of each.
If you know brand names or some other description of your other items, I would enter those in a search and determine the value of those. If you do not know brands of the lamps, etc, you may do a broad search and see if you can find a similar item!
Sounds like you have a lot of great items to sell! I would definitely recommend doing your research before you sell, to make sure you maximize your profit!!
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