Why Research Items to Sell on eBay?
Something you hear a lot from new eBay sellers is, "Where do I find inventory products to sell"? That's probably something that would need another article to fully explore, but really you can acquire inventory items to sell on eBay in lots of places. You can find items at garage sales, local auctions, online auctions, even your attic or basement. You can actually even buy items on eBay to resell on eBay. The difficulty is finding products that you can sell for a PROFIT on eBay, and the only way to do that is to learn the price an item will sell for BEFORE you buy it. Otherwise you'll pay too much for items and your potential profit will vanish.
Factors to Consider when Researching Merchandise for eBay
Since you understand now why it's essential to research inventory products before you buy them, let's examine item research a little more.
Two things are most key:
Sell Through Rate (STR%) and Average Sales Price (ASP).
The Sell Through Rate is the percentage of products that were sold out of those that were listed. So if four items were listed and 2 sold, the STR is 50%. As a rule of thumb, anything above 50% is a decent sell through rate. 60-70% is very good, and if you find a item with an 80% or better STR, you hit paydirt.
But there's more to know than the STR. You also need to know how much an item sells for. If it has an 80% sell through rate, but you can't buy it for less than it sells for, you have to pass it up and move on the next prospect. Average Sales Price (ASP) is just what it sounds like. For a certain length of time it's how much a particular product has sold for, on average.
How to Find the Average Sales Price and STR%
On eBay, using the advanced search tool to look at completed listings, it's a manual effort to get the ASP. A list must be looked through and either copy down the numbers or do them in your head. The completed listings search only displays sales from the last 15 days, which isn't always long enough if you're dealing with a rare item.
The best service I've found to do item research is an online service called Terapeak. With Terapeak, you can enter the name of a item and almost instantaneously it will present the number of eBay listing matches for your item. You can search any number of days from 7 days up to 90 days, which is truly perfect for rare items.
It also shows you the Average Sales Price and Sell Through Rate. You can take out listings that are different from what you're looking for. And you can also learn the listings on eBay that were shown in the search results, their start price, listing strategies, extra listing features, and more. There are many more features to Terapeak than can be described in this short article. Honestly, the Terapeak service has saved me hundreds of dollars by showing how much I could pay for products. It's also made me hundreds of dollars by showing me the maximum price I can expect to get for products I'm selling. Using Terapeak I went from using eBay as a hobby to Powerseller status in less than six months. If you're serious about making money on eBay, you owe it to your self to try this tool.
Source: http://www.ArticlePros.com/author.php?Rich Adams
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