Large Site Retail Competitive Research: Letting Amazon.com and eBay.com Work for You
I borrowed this title from Aaron Walls blog seobook.com because I started ranting and did not want to wear out my welcome and because the title says it all.
I realized I had a few things to say about how successful this technique can be, because I’ve used it.
Use eBay, Amazon.com and any other large retails website with a searchable database to not only price your inventory but to find out what the popular products are, how much competition exist, and opportunities for new products.
Read more about large retail competetive research here!
I am a powerseller on eBay. Been selling there since 98, although I dont give much time to it nowadays.
Now, eBay does offer several tools that are free for anyone to use. Visit eBay’s Seller Central There you will find a collection of FREE tools that will display most commonly searched items for the day, most watched (eBay bookmarked), trends and all other types of marketing research.
Also, if you own an eBay store, which will cost you a monthly fee, you are provided with search logs similar to awstats. This log provides you with a keyword report used to find the items in your store and your auctions in one place.
We used this to determine our most popular items, and the items people were seeking that we did not have. This is useful if you want to expand your inventory but dont know what to buy because it can be used to figure out what products to purchase based on what people are search for.
We actually launched an off eBay store using the most popular items as anchor products. Note these products had good profit margins so I felt that they would be good anchors for an off eBay store.
Worked like a charm. Those products are the most popular in that store for the first 9 months and those are still the most commonly sold products in our off eBay store. Although we do market those products using PPC advertising, they still sell themselves without advertising on an equal basis.
This same technique could be applied to any other large online retailer as long as similar tools are available. I also sale products on Amazon but at this time did know if they have anything near the toolset offered by eBay. Also take a look at the shopping comparison search engines like “Shopping.com” (owned by eBay), PriceGrabber.com. There are many others
