Things You'll Need:
- A computer
- Internet access
- Some free time
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Step 1
Money in your pocketResearching what sells well on ebay just requires a little common sense and some helpful ideas to get started. First, consider what you want to sell or think of some items you have around your home you can part with on ebay. The main ebay page has a search tool powered by Terapeak, which can give you a brief synopsis and price range for specific items which have sold recently. Simply go to ebay.com, click the sell tab and click "sell an item" the terapeak app will show up on that page. This is a quick and dirty way to find out what average items in that catagory will sell for, but not specifics. For example, you can enter in keywords like "sugar cookies" and it will show you what the average sales were for sugar cookies, not for specific ones like "momma yummies brand sugar snaps", etc.
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Step 2
Do the researchEbay pulse is another good free tool for researching hot trends on ebay. Ebay pulse will allow you to see which hot items people are actively searching for on ebay for specific catagories. Point your browser to pulse.ebay.com and you can see the top 10 popular searches across ebay and within sub-catagories on ebay. This is a great way to see whats hot right now on ebay.
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Step 3
The best way I know to research specific items is to type in the name of your item into ebay's search. Pretend you are a buyer, then enter in specific keywords into the search box. You'll get a list of active sales for the items that match your keywords. For example, if you're researching a hotwheels car, enter in "hotwheels car" into the search. You'll wind up with all of the hotwheels cars currently active for sale. You can get more specific by entering in the year of the item if you know it, or specifically which item it is. Let's look at our example again, you can narrow down your research if you put in "hotwheels lamborghini car" and you will get more specific information on that type of car.
Now, here's the best two tips you will ever use: 1) When you see the results of your search, you will find that buy it now's and auctions are listed together. You might want to see them separately depending on which auction type you want to use. There are tabs at the top of the search results list to separate them into JUST auctions or JUST buy it now's (BIN's). Try clicking them when doing your research to separate out which sells better.
2) When you get to any search results page, you'll have a list of options that runs along the left hand side of the page. One of those options is called "completed auctions." Click it and it will show you only the recent completed auctions for the items you're researching. This is useful in that it shows you which auctions actually SOLD, how much they sold for and which ones didn't sell. A good selling item is going to have a lot of green SOLD items. Divide the number of solds by the total number of items and you'll get a sale percentage estimate for those items on ebay.
