Saturday, August 25, 2007

How to research how much your item is worth on eBay

There are a lot of beginning sellers out there, and some with quite a bit of feedback under their belt, that do not fully understand the power of the eBay search engine, or how to find out how much their item is worth on eBay.. Well, lucky for you, I am here to help!

There are several ways to search for things on eBay, but this approach will look at how to research profit potential for any given item you have. It is a good way to see how much your item sells for, and how high you should set your bid to get the best price.

After reading this, you will be able to more effectively see how much your item is worth, and what its average selling price is.

For the first simple starter example, I will use an item that I was researching to see if it would be worth it to buy in hopes of reselling on eBay. The item was the "Garmin Edge 305 GPS with Heartrate and Cadence Monitor." But if I searched for that whole string I would find very few results. So, instead I just searched for "Garmin edge 305."

This regular search just showed me regular results, but I am not interested in that, I want to see what it has sold for in the last two weeks. To see completed listings you have to scroll down and select the "completed listings" button. Simple enough.

This shows which items sold (Green numbers) and which items did not sell (red numbers). This gave me 209 results for items that sold in the last two weeks. This is good because it shows me that it is not really a saturated market.

To narrow this down further I narrowed down my results by clicking the button on the left which only shows the items that were GPS devices, and then was further narrowed by selecting "Personal GPS Devices." This gave me only 98 results.

That is a very easy number to work with. With those 98 results I sorted by price: highest first. These are the people that I want to emulate, and the prices that I am shooting for.

To see how much an item routinely sells for, it is a good idea to scroll down the page and look for the red numbers (usually the highest numbers) to start to get replaced by the green numbers. The red numbers go from a max of about $280 to about $260 before they start to get green. I know from this that I can not expect to make more than $260 on this item.

From there I keep scrolling down until I see a large section of just green numbers that have a lot of bids next to them. These prices show how much people are willing to spend on this item. The top third of the solid green numbers is a good place to judge how much you should try to sell your item for. This item sells heavily from the $240-$220 price range.

After I narrowed the prices I want to sell my item for down, I can look in that section and see how much I can charge for shipping to maximize my profit. It looks like I can charge from $10 to $17 to have this item shipped. Since this item only costs about 8.95 to ship in a priority box I know that I can make a couple extra bucks on the shipping increase.

With all of this information compiled I would probably do a fixed price, or auction for this item starting at about $230, and charge about $10-13 for shipping.

This is the basic way that I research all of the items that I want to sell, to see the kind of price I should expect, and see where I should set my minimum bid if I do not want to lose any money.

However, there are easier ways to research the popularity of your product, and how much sells for, and even the average sell-through rate. The time saving tool that I have been using, that works very well and I am very happy with, is Hammertap. It is a great little program that researches about a month back or more, and does some pretty in depth research. It also has a free trial right now, for like two weeks!

If you have a lot of items to sell, or plan on doing a lot of research in about a month period, it is worth it to pay the minimal fee. It will save you a lot of time. That is, unless you would like to do it my free and relatively easy way.

Also, if you want to find out how to get the Garmin Edge 305 for about $130, check out my blog post: Hot Deal to help you make about $80.00! (It is only $80 because of seller fees).

Research on eBay is fairly easy with practice. If you have any questions, I will be happy to answer them in the comment section. Good luck!

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