How To Sell More On eBay By Studying Your Competitors
by: Paul Duxbury
If you’ve a savvy businessperson, the chances are you’ve already taken a look at your competitors’ auctions. What you might not have realised is just how much you can learn if you know what you’re looking for.
To begin with, don’t bother looking at listings that haven’t ended yet – you don’t know what’s going to happen with them. Instead, use the advanced search page to search for listings that sold. Just go to the advanced search page, type in the keywords that you know will find your competitors’ items, tick ‘Completed listings only’ and set the minimum number of bids to 1. Set it to sort by ‘Price: highest first’.
This will show you auctions competing with yours that have recently finished, starting with the ones that sold for the most (ignore any with prices in red – they didn’t sell). Go through and take a look, paying special attention to the following points:
Titles. What information do the top sellers of your item put in their titles, and what do they leave out? If your titles are very different to theirs, it might be time for a rethink.
Descriptions. You’ll probably notice that the highest sellers haven’t just copied text from the company’s website or an Amazon.com review – they’ve gone to the trouble of writing a little about the item, and about themselves. Learn from their example.
Pictures. I can almost guarantee you that the listing will have very nice pictures – not catalogue quality, but good enough to see what you’re getting. With items of any significant cost, you’ll probably find more than one photo from different angles.
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