November 2005

If you haven't started increasing your eBay listings by now, then you're already behind. But there's still time to take advantage of eBay's hottest season!

If you're not already a registered eBay seller, then you might want to take a look at our eBook Library for information that can help get you started right on eBay.

The next step is to get registered on eBay so you can start selling right away and take advantage of eBay's 60+ million holiday shoppers.

This is also a good time to start thinking about opening an eBay Store. You can open and run an eBay Store free for 30 days.

eBay Stores have just a $0.02 insertion fee per item for 30-day listings. Just be sure to list lots of regular auctions, as this is one of the best ways to drive traffic to your eBay Store.

From speaking with some of eBay's most successful Stores owners, having a ratio of about one auction listing for every three Stores listings seems to be the most popular listing strategy.

However, depending on how and what you sell, your needs may differ. I recommend starting out with a higher ratio of auction to Store listings, and play with it from there to find out what works best for you.

Doing product research is an important part of running a retail business. And thanks to the huge number of transactions that occur on eBay, it's a great place to see what is and isn't selling in your area of product expertise.

Using eBay for basic product research is really very simple. In a nutshell, here's how it works:

When you find an item on Wholesale Marketer that you are thinking of selling, run down to eBay and do a search for that item. Try to keep your search criteria broad enough to be sure you include all possible listings, but not so broad that you get a lot of unrelated search results.

Now, make sure you check for completed listings only. Checking currently running auctions will tell you very little about what an item sells for.

One thing you want to check for (in addition to the average ending price) is the ratio of successful auctions to unsuccessful auctions. If the ratio is low, find out why. Is it because a few sellers listed lots of items at too high a price?

Also, for successful auctions check out the winning bidder. If a particular auction ended for a much higher price than many of the others, and you discover that the winning bidder was a zero- feedback bidder, then you may want to ignore that auction's results.

For successful auctions, go in and view the item description and study other aspects of the listing (such as the category it was listed in, the time of day it was listed, any listing upgrades that were used, type and speed of shipping offered, etc.) to find out what you can about why the listing was successful.

Personally, I'll assume that if any other seller was able to sell a particular item for a particular price, then I can do it too (I'm pretty confident with my ability to sell that way, and will typically assume I can sell it for more).

Using our Data Export tool to export supplier data to a spreadsheet can be very helpful if you're familiar with manipulating data in a spreadsheet.

Once you've got all of a supplier's data into a spreadsheet, you can order the data by profit margins, category or brand, and eliminate out of stock items, low profit items, and so much more. And that's just if you know the basics of spreadsheets. More advanced users are doing things with the Data Export that I didn't even know was possible, or had ever imagined could be done.

If you're not already a member, you can get started with a free 7-day trial.

If you haven't heard, Wholesale Marketer's affiliate program is paying out $5 for every referral you send that signs up for our free trial!

Our top performing affiliates are having great success offering our 7-day free trial, some earning thousands of dollars every month!

On top of the $5 bounty for referrals, we also pay a recurring 10% commission on membership fees for as long as your referral remains a member.

Joining the Wholesale Marketer Affiliate Program is completely free. Sign up today!

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