Market research is the single most important component of your eBay success.

As many of you might know my story, I have started my eBay selling with 2 weeks of pure research and for the first go I found a product that I am still selling today. This same product generated $1.4 million dollar in sales in the last financial year (ended 1.5 month ago). The first month of this current financial year was $207,000 so it is still increasing nicely. This great success is the direct result of me finding a single product via proper market research.

I hope above made you realise the importance of proper eBay market research.

OK, the big question is “how is proper market research done?”

Well, I’ll tell you how I did my market research and hopefully it will enable you to find many products like I have.

Researcher might sound like a boring chore, however, it can be fun, Believe me.

There is a service that provides eBay data to the public. This service is the biggest part of your eBay research without using it your eBay money making project most likely will end up at its early stages.

This service is www.terapeak.com and it gives you instant advantage over your competition.

Terapeak provides information on all what is actually being sold on eBay (including all stats!) and who is selling them on what prices. What methods are used (buy it now? auction?) and who the top sellers are?

It is phenomenal!

Watch a Terapeak eBay Research Demo

I recommend you start searching for winner products within your interest. If you already have a brick and mortar store and you looking at starting on eBay, you can also highly benefit by researching your own market and see who else is doing what. You can determine how your category is doing….and what is the hottest in your category.

So, if you are just starting out and do’t have a product to sell, that is perfect, that is how I started.

Look within your interest as it will be easier to work on the product that you have at least some interest in on the long term as you build your business.

Once you start using terapeak, you’ll be thinking you have an unfair advantage. 

I’ll be posting on the exact process I used to find many winners using terapeak, so keep tuned!

Get eBay Research Now

I’ve used Auctiva from the very beginning and have always had mixed feeling towards it.  When I started using it in mid 2007 it was still free and it was certainly a great addition to our online business. It enabled us to put up to 24 pictures to eBay linting while eBay would only allow a single free image and charged for any additional pictures. It had a cross promotion tool that created a slide-show of other listings and had a great scheduling function (for free as opposed to eBay’s paid service. Auctiva provided great templates for eBay listings and it was relatively easy to use. I also liked the image hosting service of Auctiva and hosted images for my websites as well (up until I come across ezS3, however, I still have many imaged stored on Auctiva from those days. The site had quite a lot of technical issues and it was rather frustrating at times when you needed to send up listings in a larger quantity or at a specific time and the site was not responding for hours. Their customer service however, is reasonably quick and very kind. So over all it is a good experience.

I always been in niches with larger ticket items and less volume so I have not relied on Auctiva as much as smaller seller selling $20 items by the thousands would have.

Back then Auctiva tried to monetize on the platform by offering transport insurance. They transport insurance offer would go out with every listing (for user that had not changed the default settings). It was hard to imagine that the model worked and it was kind of underpinned when  they introduces a new structure to monetize on the platform in June 2009. This time they proposed a ChannelAdvisor type of charging structure pinching into the sellers profit based on a certain percentage of the sell price. Kind of like eBay does it themselves. Their user base responded outrageously and Auctiva ended up sending out a big apology from the  CEO to their client base. They introduced a low monthly free structure instead. A basic account subscription is $2.99 or something like that. It was obvious once again that this model is not going to deliver huge profitabilty.

So Auctiva ended being taken over by Alibaba, China’s top e-commerce operator. They are not disclosing how much they paid for it…would have been interesting to know.

Most of us eBay sellers have been to alibaba.com and have would have followed their growth. I used to look on Alibaba for suppliers for days on end. I never wormed to madeinchina.com, however quite liked Alibaba. I learned that you better of registering an email particularly dedicated to your Alibaba account as all kind of spammers appeared a few days and weeks after opening my account. Aside from that I only had good experience with Alibaba.

I never thought of them buying Auctiva however, after all it makes perfect sense I guess. Auctiva already has more than 170,000 active users so it quite a good gain for the new owner.

I am very curious to see where Alibaba takes Auctiva….

Starting my online carrier on eBay was perfect for me as it just made sense to sell a tangible product online. I could somehow believe it more than selling information products.

Not to mention the fact that the traffic is already there. Anyone starting out online faces the traffic question sooner or later. eBay makes perfect sense as the traffic is already there. And the traffic is not looking for information, they are looking to buy. So most of the traffic is already qualified buying traffic.

Most people starting online stop (and often quit) while trying to generate traffic to their website or offer. Starting out on eBay will enable you to get over the traffic issue instantly. If you are starting from scratch and don’t have a product to sell at this stage, that is perfect as your research will enable you to choose a highly searched product that people are actively looking for.

You can read about product research here if you haven’t read my post yet!

There is another huge advantage to starting out on eBay. I only figured this out later when I started to build my own online stores as well. During the selling process online, one of the biggest challenge is to establish trust with your customer. So even if you manage to overcome the traffic issue and you get a lot of visitors to your site, you still have to establish trust.

On eBay the trust is already there. If people like what they see, they just simply purchase. They don’t think about the security of the site or if they ever going to see the product or any those kind of second thoughts.

Once you get your business going on eBay, you’ll have lots of other opportunities to make money online if you want to spread your wings. I know many marketers who stay on eBay and keep making a killing. There are other ways to start as well of course and they all work. I just thought I share how I started and managed to grow a large online business so if you relate to my story, you could start out similarly.

I personally decided to go out and learn many other ways to generate cash online. I think eBay is a good start and it has definitely worked for me.

I still use terapeak for most of the products I research (for sell on or off eBay) as it is one of the best indicators for buying traffic ever in my opinion.

Keep your education going and start making money on eBay today!

Technorati Tags: eBay research, Making money selling on eBay, starting out on eBay, starting out online

Lot of us go to eBay first when we shop for a particular item online, but most of us will wreck our brains about how we could make money on the internet, when all we really need to do is go to the same place where we spend our money, eBay.

In my opinion, eBay is the greatest starting point for most people who are looking at making money quick on the internet. The learning curve can be very quick and easy, whereby with the right information, you can be making on the internet within a few days.

Before learning the easy way of making money on eBay, I was working as a Agricultural Scientist with an income of $3000 USD per month.  Within 4 months of my first listing on eBay, I was able to replace my income in my job with minimal time and effort.  Within 6 months I was making $5,500USD a month.  Although it was great to be making more money on the internet from home, than I was making in my profession, the real benefits were the time freedom that I now was able to enjoy.  With only having to put in 12-15 hours a week, I now had more time to enjoy my life. 

Although I was fortunate enough to be one of those people that love their job, I wanted the time freedom to be able to pursue my other passions.  Having heard that it is possible to make alot of money online, I felt should start an online business would be ideal, also offering the ability to work from the comfort of my own home while choosing the hours I want to work. I put extensive time and research into studying and perfecting an easy and effective system for making money on Ebay.

Most people have no idea how many ways there are to make money on eBay therefore they don’t see the opportunity in this massive marketplace.

It all comes down to a few key principles that need to be followed to make making money on eBay quick and easy. 

Stayed tuned for some tips on how selling on eBay is the smartest and easiest way on earth to start generating money online.

Technorati Tags: make money on the net, making money on ebay, making money quick