I have a very special favour to ask which will be beneficial to you…

It’s not a difficult favour, will only take up 30 seconds of your time and will help you in the long term. Curious? I’ll let you know what it is later on in this eletter!

First I want to reacquaint you with a nice little feature that appears on the eBay UK site. It isn’t advertised as a research tool, nor is it designed to be a research tool.

However, in my opinion it can be used to your advantage as a research tool and help you judge whether a product is a hot seller and worthy of further research with a view to selling a similar or better product yourself. Not only that, I believe this feature can actually increase your own eBay Buy It Now sales too.

If you click through into a Buy It Now listing and wait a couple of seconds you’ll see some interesting red text appear beneath the product title. For example, it might say…

  • “1 sold in last hour”
  • “35 viewed per day”

It could also say “14 viewed per hour” or “17 sold in 24 hours”. The text varies depending on how well the listing is performing.

I’ve taken a couple of screenshots so that you can see exactly what I mean and so that you know what to look out for when you try this for yourself. You can see the text circled in the examples below for portable luggage scales (which incidentally are a hot product!):

  • Example 1

eletter1

  • Example 2

eletter2This text only appears on Buy It Now listings simply because auction listings are for single items only and a figure regarding the number of sales wouldn’t apply.  It doesn’t appear on every Buy It Now listing either – again it depends on the performance of the listing. So, there are two main ways in which this single line of text could be advantageous to you:

  1. To increase your own sales
  2. As a handy research tool

Increase Your Own Sales

Looking at it from eBay’s point of view, this appears to be intended primarily as a method of enticing people to buy. The reasons for this are obvious – the more people eBay can persuade to purchase, the more selling fees they receive from you, but before you start ranting about it all being for eBay’s benefit, don’t forget that this also benefits you as the seller.

Yes, eBay receive more fees on more sales but YOU will be making those sales and earning money at the same time! It’s all to do with psychology. Here’s an example:

Imagine if a potential buyer visits your page and sees “6 sold in 24 hours”. A prospective buyer looking at your product then might see that perhaps you have only 5 of this particular item left on your listing.

This immediately creates a sense of urgency because firstly there’s the chance that the item might sell out in the next 24 hours if it continues to sell at the stated rate and secondly the potential buyer automatically thinks that this is an item worth buying – after all, so many others have already recently purchased.

In order not to miss out and because the fact that others have already bought inspires confidence, the potential buyer purchases immediately – and that’s a sale for you.

This is why it’s important you strive for page views – using super relevant keywords – and build a consistent sales history on every one of your Buy It Now listings so that eBay see your items are popular and add these little lines of text.

Use as a Research Tool

You can also use this information when it appears on other sellers’ listings to determine whether a product is a good seller when you are researching new items to add to your own inventory. By adding this little research method it will give you extra confirmation as to whether a product is hot.

Because the data is in real-time you’ll be able to study a particular product on eBay over a number of days (or weeks) and keep track of fluctuations in sales and page views.

For example, if you check the text on a sellers listing on Monday and it states: “6 sold in 24 hours”, then you check it on Tuesday and it states “14 sold in 24 hours” and on Wednesday it states “32 sold in 24 hours” it’s blindingly obvious that sales are increasing and the product is hugely in demand.

In this case you should check that sales are not just from a seasonal peak and check trends using Google or similar to be sure.

Even if an item starts decreasing in the number of sales or views it doesn’t necessarily mean you should discount it. Often products will peak and trough over a period of time so make sure you check thoroughly.

Likewise, if you see “35 viewed per hour” and over your study of a week the number of views is increasing day by day, you can be pretty sure that there is interest in the product. You can then go to the sales history and check the number of sales in the last day or so and tally this against the ‘viewed’ data.

If there are lots of views but few sales, consider what may be wrong with the listing and if you’re going to sell a similar product make sure your listing tackles these issues ensuring you make sales. If there are lots of views and lots of sales, then you’ve spotted an in demand product!

This method is obviously not what you could call ‘in-depth analytical research’ however it is most definitely a method to add to your other research strategies, so in future keep your eyes open for that little line of red text as it could be more helpful than you think.

So now, just a little favour please…

I mentioned earlier in this blog post that I have a favour to ask. Well, I say a favour but in fact this will be beneficial to you.

Back in 2009 I wrote my very first Powerseller Profiteer eletter and since then I’ve calculated that I’ve written and delivered over 375 eletters and blog posts to my ever increasing list of subscribers. That’s probably over half a million words in total!

It’s lucky then that I enjoy writing! And it’s even luckier that I enjoy writing about subjects that ultimately you can benefit from and can make your online selling journey easier.

But what’s luckiest is that I get real pleasure from being able to help you – which is one of the reasons I ensure my eletter reaches you every single week and always includes helpful, up to date information for you – and all for free.

I know that starting an online business can be challenging and so at the start, any advice and information that can help you is usually very much appreciated. It certainly was when I was at the start up stage!

Sometimes though, it’s more useful to actually ‘see’ something being done rather than ‘reading’ about how to do it and so that’s why, alongside this weekly free eletter I have now launched my own You Tube Channel.

All you need to do – and this is the favour – is go here to eTail Hub You Tube and subscribe to my channel.

youtubeOnce again, it’s completely free and there are videos uploaded, ready and waiting for you right now that you can benefit from once you subscribe.

It’s important that you subscribe using the red ‘subscribe’ button (which you’ll find on the top right of the channel page) so that you don’t miss out on future videos due to be uploaded very soon.

Thank you and I look forward to seeing you over there!