It’s been another hugely busy week for me with my mentor students, who I have to say are very eager to learn and a delight to teach! I’ve been busy preparing webinars, recording videos, and keeping up to date too – all without the help of my errant husband who has jetted off to Portugal on the pretext of needing to ‘help a friend build a fence at his villa’. Hmmm…sounds a bit suspect to me, but as I’m not there I’m pleased to hear that it’s been raining for most of the week whilst the weather here in the UK has been quite balmy compared to what it was like earlier in the month. Let’s hope it’s nice for the bank holiday weekend!
Anyway, there was plenty to keep me occupied this week and on Monday I received an email from Jake Becker from Watchcount. If you don’t already know, Watchcount is a fantastic site that can help you, as an online seller, with your product and keyword research. It works a little like the old ebay Pulse tool (except Watchcount is much better!)
Jake and the team are always coming up with new tools to add to the already very impressive site, and just recently they have added another new option which I’ve just tested myself. I’m pleased to say that it works perfectly and so I thought I’d share it with you so that you can try it for yourself.
First up, here’s what Jake wrote in his email:
“Just wanted to let you know about a new, small feature on WatchCount.com that we’re finding some eBay sellers are very much appreciating.
If you’ve ever run an eBay Completed Items search and found a Best Offer item that sold, and wanted to know the final selling price we can usually show you. As you know, it used to be available on eBay itself, but eBay’s search algorithms have been changing lately, and the actual selling price for such Best Offer items is often obscured.
For items that sold within the past 1-2 months, just paste the eBay listing number into our homepage, then review the Item Lookup Info. There’ll be a “Sold For” entry that either shows the final selling price, or there’ll be a link to eBay that shows it there.”
Whether you are someone who buys online or sells online, research is very important.
As a buyer why would you pay more for something, when you could purchase it cheaper elsewhere just by conducting some simple online research? You’ll be surprised though, at how many people actually don’t bother with any research – they simply head straight to ebay, or straight to Amazon depending on where their loyalties lie – search for the item they want, and purchase immediately!
Now this buying attitude is great for online sellers – because it means that you don’t necessarily need to advertise your products at the cheapest price to make sales, plus if you list on both ebay and Amazon you’ll be targeting both markets rather than just one – that’s ebay buyers and Amazon buyers.
However, it’s not so good for buyers who – by not doing their research – are ultimately wasting money and missing out on getting what they want at the best price.
As a seller you can’t just guess the price that your products will sell for! Research will reveal vital information such as how competitive the niche is, the prices that your competitors are selling similar products in that niche for, and the quantities of a product being sold on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.
And that’s where Watchcount’s new tool can help you with those final selling prices that are harder to judge – like ‘best offer’. It doesn’t matter if you are a buyer, or a seller. Here’s how…
Buyers
As a buyer you obviously want to get the best deal for any item you purchase, so if an item is being sold regularly on the ‘best offer’ option, other than seeing generally whether an offer was declined or accepted, you can’t actually tell how much an accepted offer was for…but now you can using the data from Watchcount. If you are looking to purchase a similar item you will then know exactly how much to offer using best offer, to make sure you stand a chance of your price being accepted should a similar item or the same item be listed.
Sellers
If you want to research the average price that a particular item has achieved in the past when sold on ‘Buy It Now’ with additional ‘Best Offer’, simply insert the item number into Watchcount and you’ll see the price the item sold for. If a seller is regularly accepting lower prices for the item then you can consider this to be the true market value. If you then source the item yourself you can list it at a competitive price on a regular Buy It Now listing… and watch the orders come in!
All you need to do is simply copy the listing number from the completed product listing that you want to check, access Watchcount here and paste the listing number into the yellow ‘keywords’ box at the top of the page. The results will be presented to you on the same page immediately, allowing you to see exactly what the best offer was on that item. Easy!