The Silent Avatar Speaks

No doubt taking a business online is a decision which shouldn’t be taken lightly. It’s easy to get caught up in all the hype of the Internet, but the bottom line is “will you see a return on your investment”?

One of the biggest headaches can be getting traffic (aka customers) to your site, and eBay already has that covered.

Here are the traffic statistics from Alexa.com

Of course there is a multitude of ways to drive traffic to your site. Most take time to do, others you can pay money for and get moving straight way. All should be monitored (especially if you are spending advertising dollars to get the customers) as to how effective they are for you.

So here are a couple of scenarios which you may want to consider…

1. Open an online shop and either hold physical stock or drop ship.

2. Sell your products for a competitive price (including postage).

3. Advertise your site using free classified, forum posts, Pay Per Click advertising, etc

or

1. Research your market on Ebay
   Log in and go to “Advanced Search”. Input your product (be specific). Check “Search Title and Description” and Check “Completed Listings Only”, and check “new items only” (if you sell new) - then search. This will return you a listing of SOLD items which have been listed for sale on eBay, which are more than likely products you would offer to sell.

   Note: Search through “all Categories”, then refine down your listings using “Narrow your results” (which is accessed by going to the left of the window)

   Only review the listings highlighted in green (these are sold items).

   Now… Start a spreadsheet or pen/paper and input the data from the sold items.

2. Enter in the following:

· Item Name ( you want to know which items are the biggest sellers)

· Sold price – (because you want to know the lowest/highest price you can sell for

· Date sold – you want to know which day/s things sell more of than other days.

· Time sold – you want to know which time is the best sale time.

· Postage – you want to know what postage is reasonable (though you shouldn’t make money on postage – it should be flat postage fee plus an amount to cover packaging and getting to the post office).

· The seller (the best seller may have tricks you can use)

Armed with the information from Ebay you have a much better idea what people are willing to pay for the item you are going to sell. You also have a good idea what day you should be listing your items, and what time you should be listing them to get them in front of buyers, and how you should be listing them (I’ll go into that next post).

If you have found that the price people are willing to pay is something that you can work with, the next step is to use this information and set up a listings on Ebay of around 30 products (they don’t all have to be individual products) and list them on the day and time that your research has turned up as being the best time to sell. Don’t list the same items one after the other.

Do this for 1 month and see how sales go.

While you are doing your research you can also be checking out other auction sites like oztion.com.au and do the same thing.

You can also check out forums in your selected niche (let’s say you want to sell Xbox 360 video games). You can simply Google search for “Xbox forums”, join up and have a look around the forum for anyone who is talking about where they buy their games. You can also get a pretty good idea about what products they are buying.

While this might sound a little tedious it will pay huge dividends and either confirm to you the project is viable, or scrap it as you can’t compete with what is already out there (and lets face it with imports from china it’s getting harder and harder to compete)

Having said that… all is not lost if the price issue is looking pretty grim.

If you specialise in a “niche” (and I’ll use the video games as an example, you could “specialise” in games for only Xbox or a certain type of game ie; racing car, war games, etc.

If you determine you have a viable product and can sell at a price which is comparable to your competition, you are then good to go…

You can either set up your own website and market traffic directly to the site or set up a full eBay store and run it as a business, or, you can keep listing products (using the research you have done), and just list single items to sell.

Over to you….

As always feel free to post a comment or question for me to answer.

Tags: Business Tips, Internet Marketing, Traffic Generation //