Finding Products That Sell

There are millions of items out there that sell quite well on eBay. Why is it, then, that we hear people grumbling that you can’t get “anything for anything” on eBay any more? They’re not doing their homework, that’s why! Sure, a lot of things don’t bring what they used to in the good ol’ days of eBay, but there are just as many things that bring mind boggling prices today. Things that you can find at your neighborhood yard sale, the thrift store, junk stores, auctions, curbside and yes, even antique shops. These are not rare and hard to find items. They are hidden treasures. Here’s how to learn what to look for.

Using eBay’s search, type in your keyword or phrase. It’s best to be fairly specific or you’ll end up with too many choices and a strange results page you can’t do much with. When you come to the resulting page, look to the left sidebar and click on “search completed auctions”. You have to be signed onto eBay to do this, which means you have to be a registered eBay user.

You’ve clicked on “search completed auctions”, now click “search” at the bottom of the column. On the page that comes up, you’ll see the completed auctions for the last two weeks. But don’t stop here. This is very important. Now look above the right side of the listed auctions. You’ll see a box labeled “sort”. You want to choose, “Price+Shipping: Highest First”. They’ve done us a disfavor by adding in the shipping here, but you can still get a good idea.

Depending on your keyword, you might need to scroll quickly through a page or two to get past the true rarities or large pieces of furniture, then you get to the meat. Make notes. Print out the auctions. Or print just the picture and jot down the price and date sold. The main things you’ll want to keep are picture, price, date sold, category, how many bids and description.

Why is it important to record how many bids something gets? If one person bid the $5000 asking price, they might be the only person crazy enough to buy it at that price. If two people bid it up to $5000, maybe it was simply a bidding war and each didn’t want the other to get it, but if 15 people bid it up to $5000, well, you’ve probably got a winner!

It’s also important to do a search for the same item to see the selling range. It’s not uncommon to see an item sell anywhere from $9.99 to $49.99. This takes a little extra sleuthing to figure out what went wrong with the lower price and what went right with the higher priced one. Sometimes it’s obvious like a crack, gosh awful picture, very little description, etc. Sometimes there is no rhyme or reason. Just luck of the draw.

Already know what you want to look for? Go ahead! Search! You can do it from here with the box on the left or go straight to www.ebay.com

Need help with some keyword ideas? See our keyword suggestion page.