Monday, June 14, 2010

A Little Lesson in Researching

I think I have a bit of a knack for finding things that others seem not to, so i want to share my method and hope it helps someone else!

So let's say I have a pink widget to sell, hmmmm.... this particular widget has rhinestones and pearls and is on a base of Bakelite - ok so I like jewelry ;-)

First thing I do is go to an EBay search and type in pink rhinestone widget - I try to use as few words as possible at first, so this brought up 256 live listings - too many for my purposes! So I add pearl, brought it down to 184, better but not quite there... add Bakelite.... ahhhhh a manageable 43. ok So I look at those... and oh yes sort by highest first as I want to definitely look at the ones asking a higher price, then I go to completed listings - this will give me a very good idea what the very current market trend is since eBay's completed search only covers the last week. There are 25 ended listings - about half sold.

So I take this information and look for what is common between the successful listings as far as keywords in the title. I also examine did the higher priced ones sell in auction format or fixed price? There is so much valuable information you can gather very quickly using this method.
Just remember when putting in words to search less is more! You can pull up the listings which sold the highest based on the very basic information - then narrow it down from there.

Now if there are none of your item listed on eBay or completed.... well come back tomorrow for that lesson!

2 comments:

mymomsbooks said...

Such logic!

Kat Simpson said...

Good info on researching how to list but I still think you have a GIFT for finding the stuff - you have trained your eye well :)