What Product You Choose To Sell Is The Most Important Element To Your eBay Success

What You Choose To Sell Is The Main Factor In eBay Success

Many people ask me what the most important thing is in determining if you will be a successful seller on eBay. I would have to say it's what item or items you choose to sell. You can be the best marketer in the world, the best sales person in the world, the best at eBay SEO and product promotion but if people don't have a need or want your product nobody will buy it.

Now that's not to say eBay SEO, listing optimization, quality of listings is not important, it's very important. You can pick a top selling product but if you have crappy listings you won't sell it. So how you go about things is important but ultimately the first step to success is making sure you select a good product.

So how do you know what a good product is? You could blindly throw darts at a wall picking and ordering small quantities of products and testing them out, or you could do some research before hand using a program like Terapeak and know with certainty an item is selling say $10,000 worth of product a week with a 100% sell through rating.

Now again just because others are having success with that product doesn't mean you will, but at the very least you know there's a demand for what your selling. From there it's up to you, your sales rank, seller metrics, listing optimiztion and if you go about doing all that correctly your listings will rank high and in turn sell.

For me personally Terapeak is critical to my eBay success both in finding products, sourcing products, and running analytics to make sure the products I find are going to be winners. You can actually get a FREE 7 Day Trial to Terapeak to try it out if you like. 

eBay Best Practices - 3 Tips For Ranking Your Items Higher In eBay Searches

How To Rank Higher In eBay Searches

Want to rank your items higher in eBay searches? Today we're going to be discussing 3 eBay best practices which will give your seller account and your items a boost in eBay search.

We have all heard the term SEO. It refers to search engine optimization. Basically knowing what search engines are looking for to rank items high and then meeting those requirements in an effort to get your website, article, blog, etc to rank higher in searches.

Though many of us don't think of eBay as a search engine, eBay most definately is a search engine. eBay and Amazon are two of the largest search engines in the world. Only thing is they don't search the web, they just search products on their website. That said the same way SEO applies to websites, there's SEO involved in putting together an eBay listing and getting it to rise to the top of eBays page one in searches. But how do you do this?

In this post were going to discuss 3 tips for getting your items ranked higher in eBay searches. Now first off your seller rank and feedback plays a very important role. That's not something your going to be able to build or change overnight, but the sooner you get started the sooner your rankings will improve. There are some things you can put into action today which will give your items a boost in search. Here they are.

1. Offer Free Shipping

Whenever possible offer FREE shipping on your eBay listings. eBay outright tells us they give a boost in search to sellers who offer free shipping. Buyers also like free shipping because A. it's free, but B. it's easier seeing free shippign or even a flat rate shipping as opposed to making a buyer enter their zipcode in the listing to find out what an item will cost in shipping.

Just roll the shipping cost into the item cost. If you would normally sell a phone charger for $10 with $2 shipping, just make the price $12 and offer free shipping. Your still getting the same amount of money and your going to get a boost in search.

The only time I would recommend against doing this is on larger, heavier, bulkier items. Reason being it may cost $50 to ship an item to California from where you live but only $10 to ship it a state over to say Wisconsin. With an item which has a much higher shipping if you go towards the higher end more local buyers are way overpaying for shipping and if you go on the lower or medium end of shipping prices without a doubt you will wind up getting a buyer from the other end of the country and the shipping fee you charged will not cover shipping, you will be comming out of your own pocket.

Aside from especially large, heavy and bulky items I would always recommend offering FREE SHIPPING.

2. Accept 14 Day Returns With A 20% Restocking Fee

I know many sellers don't like accepting returns. I'm with you, it's a hassle and it costs you money. That said in order to be eligible to be a top ranked and power seller you need to accept returns.

One strategy I use to meet this requirement, rank my items higher while still discouraging returns is to accept returns for the minimum amount of time 14 days, while also charging a 20% restocking fee. Now if an item arrives broken or not as described you cannot charge that fee, however if it's just a case of buyers remorse or the person doesn't want the item, they can return it, but will be charged a 20% restocking fee. This greatly discourages returns. At the end of the day you may want to waive that 20% restocking fee to avoid upset buyers and bad feedback, however it does act as a deterrent from people buying items on a whim and returning for no reason.

3. Use Terapeak

This is kind of hard to wrap up in a bullet point, I've made entire presentations and webinars on Terapeak and what an important tool it is to eBay sellers. Terapeak can help you with every aspect of your eBay business from finding you hot selling items with the hot selling or category research tools. It can help you analyze products your thinking about selling prior to buying inventory, and it can even help you source the inventory from Alibaba.

What I find most valuable about Terapeak from the persepctive of ranking your eBay items higher is the SEO and Product Research tools. The SEO tool will allow you to search a product or keyword and find out how much is sold in a given week, the sell through ranking. You can see the top 20 sellers ie your competitors. You can also find out what keywords buyers of your product are searching for and not only that but in the order of importance. You can then use those keywords in your listings title and description, putting an emphasis on putting the most important keywords to the front of the title. This gives a huge boost in eBay SEO or optimizing your eBay listing.

For those of you who aren't aware of Terapeak or who havn't tried it out you can get a FREE 7 day trial to test it out for yourself.

How I Do $250,000 a Month Selling Alibaba and Ali Express Products on eBay & Amazon 

Have you tried your hand at selling on eBay but not had much luck? Chances are your selling the wrong products and not putting your listings together in a way that eBay ranks them high in searches. Without traffic going to your listings they aren't going to sell. 

Watch this great webcast on eBay selling. This video breaks down exactly how to find hot selling products guranteed to sell. Never buy inventory that doesn't sell again. This method uses a program called Terapeak which allows you to pull past eBay sales data to find out information such as the best time of day and day of the week to list your item. Most buyers of certain items tend to buy at the same day of the week and same time of day. This program also shows you possibly most valuable of all the top keywords for your product. You'll know exactly what terms the buyers of your items are searching for and will therefore be able to put those keywords in your listings title which will in turn help you rank higher in eBay searches.  

You can know before even buying a product how many similar items are sold per week, the overall sales, and even the sell through rate. You can even take a look at your top 20 competitors and try to replicate what they are doing to be successful. 

More than anything though this video focuses on how to find hot selling products, and then how to source them cheaply on Ali Express and Alibaba. 

Watch this video and see how someone does over $250,000 in sales each month using these methods. 

If your interested in trying out the analytic website featured in this video you can get a free trial by clicking here.

 

eBay SEO Optimization - How To Find Best Keywords

How To SEO Your eBay Listing

How well are your eBay listings ranking? Are your items showing up on the first page of eBay? If not chances are you aren't optimizing your eBay listing to it's full potential.

Though many factors come into play for eBay SEO such as seller metrics, description, pictures, item specifics, and other elements, one of the most important aspects to ranking high in eBay searches or mastering eBay SEO as they call it is using the optimal keyword and title structure in your listings titles.

How am I able to get my eBay listings to regularly on the first page of eBay searches? I use Terapeak to pull data on what terms eBay buyers are searching for in an effort to get my listings to climb to the top of eBay's first page.

Terapeak offers everal tools which are very helpful in doing this. The first tool is the eBay SEO tool of Terapeak as seen in the screenshot below

eBay SEO Tool

As you can see here as we'll a search on the word "watermelon slicer" and you'll see how Terapeak is able to pull up relevant search terms as well as a descriptor to tell us the context of the word whether it be a brand, material, or other descriptor.

Sample eBay Keyword SEO Report From Terapeak

As you can see in the image above we see the word "stainless" and "steel" refer to the color and material while words like "slicy" refer to a specific brand of watermelon slicer. We are also shown the number of sellers selling items with this keyword, an average sale price, and a few pictures of several of the product.

It doesn't just stop there though. Terapeak also has a product research tool in which we are able to see the keywords in order of importance. The goal when putting a eBay listing together is to try to put the most searched keywords as close to the front of the eBay listing as possible. It's oftentimes also not a bad idea to try to repeat the number one searched keyword at least twice at some point during the title.

eBay Product Research

Now you can still use SEO tactics in your eBay listing without Terapeak, however it's somewhat like trying to find a destination without a map. Without Terapeak we can make educated guesses about what keywords customers will likely be searching but we don't know for sure. With Terapeak we know with certainty what keywords customers are searching for, but not only that, we also know in order of importance in eBay's eyes.

If your interested in giving Terapeak a try you can get a FREE 7 Day Trial.

How To Find Sell Through Rating Of Products On Ebay Using Terapeak

How To Find eBay Sell Thru Ratingns

eBay Sellers, one of the most important analytic data points you need to know about when considering an item to potentially sell on eBay is not just the overall weekly sales, but also the sell through ratings.

What the eBay sell through rating is, it shows us how likely an item is to sell on eBay. For example, say there's 1000 listings on eBay for silicone spatulas. If 900 of them sell, that gives us a 90% sell through rating.

Personally I think anything below a 40% sell through rating probably isn't worth selling. Anything above 40% is worth investigating and 50% and above is respectable numbers.

One other point, if I ever see a sell through rating at 90% or above, what that tells me is there is a demand for a product but not enough people listing that product.

In this video below I show you how to find out the sell through rating of an eBay item using a program called Terapeak.

If you're interested in trying out this product you can get a FREE 7 Day Trial to test it out before buying!