The Basics – Start Selling on eBay (if you want to skip this bit, click here)
Whether you just wish to have a general clear out and make some money selling unwanted / used or new items or you have your own business with a web site and wish to expand into the ebay marketplace here are a few pointers to head you in the right direction for successful selling on ebay.
Buyers need to gain your trust therefore before selling any items it is best to have some positive feedback – in the region of 20-40. Don’t worry, this is easy to do! This blog will concentrate on people that wish to expand their business and open a shop to sell their items on ebay.
Buy some cheap or required items through ebay to build up your feedback – providing you pay straight away the seller will give you 100 per cent positive feedback. Some sellers automate feedback so you will receive feedback straight after purchase, others may give it to you manually. If this is the case wait a few days and if you haven’t received any message the seller and ask politely for some feedback.
As you can see this business seller has 190561 positive feedback!
Once you have gained a good amount of feedback, it is time to set up your shop. Dependent on the number of items you wish to sell, you will need to make the decision on which shop ‘Subscription’ you should sign up to. https://www.ebay.co.uk/sub/subscriptions
A Word about eBay Fees
Dependent on the subscription chosen, you will get a number of free listings and reduced final value fees, but commonly as of April 2020 you will lose 10 percent of what you sell on ebay – plus if the buyer uses Paypal to purchase the item , Paypal commonly charge 2.9 per cent of the total sale price (including any postage charges) and a flat 35p per transaction.
Ebay charges two basic fees an insertion fee and a final value fee.
‘Insertion’ fee. This is the basic fee to list an item – normally a flat 35p per item. However, you can list up to 1,000 items a month without paying any charge if you have the correct subscription.
Final value fee. When an item sells, you have to pay a flat 10% of the final sale price, including postage. This applies to every item, including those listed for free. The final value fee is capped at £250, ie, you pay 10% on items up to the value of £2,500.
The object you want to link to.
How to decide what is profitable to sell on EBay
eBay do take a large percentage of your sales, so it is important that the selling price of your item allows you to make a profit for successful selling on eBay! How much profit you wish to make is up to you! However, if you over price items then they won’t sell, so its important to either keep up with your competitors or slightly undercut them!
Research Research Research for Successful Trading on eBay
It is worth spending time researching what products and how products are sold on eBay. This is where this great Ebay competitor analysis software comes into play. Fast Intell allows you to identify what products sell well, what products don’t sell well. This is so beneficial as we can start listing our shop items armed with the correct knowledge to sell our own items quickly and cost effectively.
For a free trial of FastIntell, click here.
Research eBay Sellers
Ok, let’s say we are a business selling sports / games equipment and we wish to list our branded skateboards on eBay. The first thing we should research is the current list of sellers selling skateboards and see what revenue they generate! So we use Fast Intell’s keyword search type in the word skateboard(s) and other criteria we wish to measure – such as Buy It Now Only listings and in a flash will generate the data and present us with the Top 500 sellers.
This report represents UK eBay sellers but Fast Intell allows you to search any eBay country.
Fast Intell’s Seller Report
From Fast Intell’s report we can see the seller name, number of listings with the keyword skateboard, eBay’s ranking , lifetime number of sold items, total revenue and average price. It is sorted in ascending order of number of listings.
We can see that rampworxshop1 has sold a total of £135,643.97 (WOW!) items containing the word skateboard, with an average price of £25.78.
Fast Intell’s Best Selling Brands for Successful Selling on ebay
Fast Intell’s report also summarises the best selling brands of skateboard, if we click on the BRANDS tab we are greeted with this insightful data.
As we can see from Fast Intell’s report, after unbranded stakeboards brands Venom and Two Bare feet are the most popular brands on ebay.
Further more, using Fast Intell’s report for successful selling on eBay we can select any seller and view their listings of skateboards. In this example I am looking at rampworxshop1’s listing.
Fast Intell Seller Listing report
There is lots of valuable data we can gain from this report to enable us to successfully trade on EBay. Start time is a valuable piece of data because as we know if the item has been selling for a long period of time, then ebay gives this more visibility – very similar to Google SEO the longer the website has been around the more search visibility it gets! As we can see here the Jessup Griptape Skateboard listing went live in 2016 with over £12K of sales so it would be hard to compete with this listing. The only way to compete with it would be to have a much lower price and / promote you new listing – however it may not be cost effective to do this!
Market share
Fast Intell’s charts allow you to see what percentage market share sellers have for products which helps for successful selling on eBay. In our example with the keyword ‘skateboards’ we can see that 12% of the market is dominated by thewhgroup.
Using all this information from Fast Intell’s eBay competitive analysis software, we as a new seller can gain an understanding of what is selling well , how it is selling ie Buy It Now / auction , pricing information, stock volumes and who the competitors are for our similar or same products.
Further Research
Fast Intell allows us to research into specific eBay categories in order to determine who is the top seller in that category and what it is they are selling. Here is an examples of using the category research tool – we are going to look at the top 500 sellers of skateboarding , stickers and grip tape.
Searching on eBay’s categories
Here is the data that Fast Intell has found
We can see that thewhgroup ranks No 1 for its sales of Venom Grip Tape which was first listed on 21/3/2019. If we look closely at this report we can see that at No 3 and No 4 ranking only listed a month ago 16/03/2020 are the 101 Hyperbeast Sticker pack and 25 hyperbeast stickers, this tells us that we could break into this market as within the Top 5 there are new listings.
Spy on your competitors – Seller Data!
One of the most useful features of Fast Intell’s competitive analysis software allows you to enter a seller ID and see their top 500 sales as well as other information, which we will discuss in a later blog. Today, let’s continue with our skateboard theme and the last report on tape and stickers. The above report showed us that uk_sticker01 had newly listed some stickers that ebay ranked highly. You may like to analyse this seller in greater detail to see how much income he makes and other items he may sell.
I now add the seller into Fast Intell’s software and run a Top 500 report. The information gained is that he has 9 Active listings and he started to list on 16/3 – just as the UK have gone into lockdown for Covid-19. So this is a new business seller and in the two months of listing has generated lifetime sales of £3728.
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