eBay Selling, Use the Completed Listings Tab to Do Research on Your Competitors

When selling on eBay, it is hard to find any kind of "niche" market. With the Marketplace being such a behemoth these days and people selling anything from dryer lint to high end automobiles, it is hard to find anything that isn t being sold online. However, it is still possible to find those categories, that even with ton of items listed for sale, aren t being sold and auctioned correctly or simply do not have enough listings or a big variety of items to sell well. These are the markets to find product for. Sometimes when deciding what to sell, it can help to start with simple research and launch a new product that you know will sell well making sure to guarantee success for your start up eBay business. When entering a keyword into the search box on eBay s homepage and performing a search for an item, a left hand navigation screen will appear beside the items for sale for that search. When scrolling down the page to about the middle section, you will notice a section on this left hand navigation bar with the title in light orange "Search Options". Under this category it has an option with a checkbox next to it "Completed listings". If you place a check in this box by clicking on it and then at the bottom of this same search options category click on the white button "Show Items", it will take you to the completed listings for this search for the last 90 days. eBay keeps a record on their site for the last 90 days of all listings that have ended including auctions, fixed price or store inventory product. This is an invaluable tool for anyone looking to sell on this marketplace or for anyone who is currently selling. I have been selling online for more than 10 years and I still use this feature for completed listings at least once a month. The data that it provides is as good as any traffic or sales report that I receive weekly. When selling anything whether online or retail locally, it is extremely important to understand and to know as much as possible about your competition. Your competitors may be changing and growing as rapidly as your own online business and you need to know what is working and not working for them. My eBay Store, Sit On This Ergonomics, is constantly updating as we add new product, make price changes and tailor our ads and text to better suite our product. Each change that we make has a direct effect on our business and how our customers purchase from us. Any good entrepreneur knows how important it is to stay ahead of the game and educating yourself on your direct competitors can help you to do this. Using the completed listings tabs can allow you to search by price, time or type of listing to even better tailor your research results to what you need for your type of item. Looking for how many of these items actually ended with buyers, how many items sold without any bids or clicks, how many categories are oversaturated with listings, or what price these items ended with are all important for a decision on whether or not to choose that item to sell online. Knowing the price that the item sells for can be the most important and I recommend when using the button for completed listings to use the pull down menu to sort the items by highest or lowest price to really see the range of prices better and to determine if you can even compete with the low prices found everyday online. On the eBay marketplace, items are sold at a far reduced rate from normal retail price. It is estimated that unless you can find an item with a price that is at least 60% below current retail value, you shouldn t waste your time, because someone is already selling it on eBay for this low discount price. It also helps to know if the price is low enough. Sometimes a product will show up with a lot of listings and yet no one is actually buying when you get down to the nitty gritty. Putting product out there online is different from actually selling it. You need to have a price low enough to have it sell now and keep it selling for a while to make it online. Using this tab can help you to do research needed to find out what the competitors are doing and how the product is selling in order to sell smart and sell well on the eBay marketplace. © 2007 Sit On This Ergonomics, LLC. Author Bio: Amy Pedersen has worked in the Ergonomics and Office Furniture industry for over 10 years and is owner of Sit On This Ergonomics, an eBay PowerSeller Store, operating a number of ergonomic websites dedicated to Office Chairs and ergonomics. Selling on eBay for the past 7 years, Amy is considered an expert in all things eBay and offers her services to people looking to sell on eBay on an ongoing basis. Accepting jobs, she specializes in eBay Store Website Design and eBay Logo Design for eBay Store Owners as well as classes, lectures, blogs and private tutoring sessions with clients on all aspects of selling and owning an eBay business. Please contact her for more information through her websites if interested. eBay Wholesale Tips: Author s eBay Blog Visit Our eBay Store: Sit On This Ergo