 Welcome to the first in the series of 100 countdown tips for selling on eBay. Now some of these will be more in-depth, some of them will be more basic. There is always something for everyone to learn and this is the place for it. So we're going to go into this and let's get going for the first in the series. Okay, so in this episode we're going to cover a couple of points that are crucial for anyone that's looking to become successful as a seller on eBay. Now the two areas we're going to cover are understanding the eBay policies and fees and also we're going to be covering researching popular and profitable items. Now we'll break these down into manageable bites and let's get straight into it. So the first one we want to be looking at is the understanding eBay policies and fees. Now this is crucial, especially in the environment that we're currently in with the AI control, sorry, over the platform and how that can impact your account as well as the fees and how that affects your bottom line, your profit margin. Okay, so we're going to break this first section down into three parts. Okay, policy familiarization, fee structure and payment processing. Okay, so let's go with the first one with the policy familiarization. Now before diving into selling on eBay, you need to take the time to thoroughly read and understand eBay's policies. These policies cover various aspects of the selling process, including listing guidelines, prohibited items and acceptable seller behavior. Now adhering to these policies is essential to maintain a positive selling experience and avoid potential issues or penalties. Now this is crucial. Okay, now you need to make sure that you have looked at these policies, even if it's just the basic areas of the policies, you need to work out where to find out list or Vero brands if you want to be checking to make sure you don't fall into a branding copyright issue. You need to be making sure that your products that you wish to sell are not in a prohibited category. There are certain things that you cannot sell on the platform and it's crucial for you to actually look through these things, have a look familiarize yourself and understand at least the basics when you're starting out to make sure that you don't fall into a pitfall area of suspensions or permanent bans from selling on eBay. These things can happen and sometimes they are just out of our control where we just didn't know they were going to happen because we didn't do that initial research. Now you need to look through that list. You don't need to go through everything at this stage but you need to start out with understanding what it is you're getting into, what areas you're going to be looking into and we'll cover the areas you're looking into further on in the second section but you need to understand it. It's crucial, absolutely crucial. The next step on the area we're looking at today is the fee structure. Now eBay charges sellers for using the platform and it's crucial to understand that the fee structure to optimize your pricing strategy. Now you could find that the categories you're in may have a very high fee structure and because you haven't taken that into account you could be cutting your profit margin down considerably without actually researching that part of what you're looking at selling or maybe it could be a case you're making more. It just depends but you need to be looking at those categories. Now you could be looking at selling across the board but you need to be looking at what you're going to be affected on. Okay so these areas can include the insertion fees for your listing items, the final value fees based on the sale price and additional fees for optional services like promoted listings, off-site ad campaigns and things like this. Now regular reviewing of the eBay policies to ensure accurate pricing and avoid unexpected costs is paramount. You need to make sure that you're regularly checking for these updates. You need to be regularly checking to make sure there aren't any changes. Now beyond that point you've then got the payment processing. Okay so eBay now manage everything through the manage payments section. Now you need to familiarize yourself with the features and fee structure around this, understand how the payments are processed on eBay and this will help you manage your finances and provide a seamless buying experience for customers. Okay so we're moving on to the second section of this quick tip countdown and this one is covering research popular and profitable items. Now we'll break this down into five sections for you. The first one being market trends. Now you need to explore eBay's trending categories and best selling items. You need to understand the current market trends helping you identify products that are in demand. This will allow you to take informed decisions about the type of inventory you want to be selling on the platform. Now you can use tools like Terapeak to analyze market trends, sales data and identify high demand products. I find that Terapeak is not the most reliable and the information it gives is more geared to looking after eBay than it is you as an individual. There's a lot of flaws within that Terapeak software and information on the platform. Personally, I prefer to use something much more reliable for my research options which is Zcanalytics. Now I'll go into a little bit more of a breakdown for that later on for you giving you a brief overview of the platform, the benefits and just the wealth of information that's available for you but either way let's just move on. For the moment we're looking next at niche selection. Now you can consider specializing in a niche or a category where you have expertise or a genuine interest. Specializing can help you stand out in a specific market, attract a target audience and establish yourself as a knowledgeable seller. The next section along will be the competitor analysis. Now research successful eBay sellers within your chosen niche analyze their listings, pricing strategies and customer engagement. Understanding what works for competitors can provide insights into effective selling techniques and help you differentiate your offerings. So next along is the profitability assessment. Now you need to evaluate the potential profitability of the items you intend to sell. You need to consider factors such as your sourcing costs, your shipping fees and seller fees on eBay. You need to calculate that potential profit margin to ensure that your business is financially viable. Within that you need to consider things like seasonal considerations. Now take into account seasonal variations in demand for certain products. Some items may sell better during specific times of the year and being aware of these trends can help you plan your inventory and marketing strategies accordingly. Okay so here in this section we're going to go over the ZIC analytics in a few bits of details just to show you the scope of research that's available to you within this platform. Now when this software originally came out it was geared solely towards sourcing and drop shipping that type of thing and comparative market research for platforms that sell products such as eBay, AliExpress, Amazon etc etc Walmart etc but the platform has grown just massively since then. There are so many aspects within this piece of software for research and optimization that it's just a phenomenal tool to have in your arsenal. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go into a bit more detail for you here just show you what's on there what's all the things you can use it for and then basically just give you a quick demonstration of just some drilling in to give you a bit of insight as to what you can do. It's not going to be massive it's just going to give you an overall we can also cover this in future videos but here we go let's go for it let's go for it. Okay so here on the main dashboard of the software on ZIC analytics on this particular package I have the full scope but obviously different bits of information available depending on what level you look at now obviously this is currently showing on UK so we'll just drop that over so trending niches so you can see the trending niches that are currently in the last 30 days going well on eBay so if you're looking to what type of item if you want to start sourcing when you're out there looking at thrift stores market stores carboos sales wholesale searches whatever it is you're into you know I mean whatever it is that's your avenue for search these can give you an idea of what's trending at the moment within the areas out there on your country and as you can see you you can choose Australia sorry US UK Germany Australia China and Aliexpress well we're not worried about that but in this area we're looking at US so we've obviously that's where it's showing you this list so let's just have a quick run down the side now you can do product research which is what we're looking at here for the moment which is the point of this video which is the research area okay so if you were to click on that you're then presented with this screen now excuse me from here you can see the first one is what marketplace now it depends where you are in the world you know what platform you're on where you're selling so you can start looking at who your competitors are in your area okay so let's just go with eBay.com being the largest one uh shipping location obviously being US states uh United States as well so you can look at the date range now you can look at the last week last fortnight last three weeks or the last 30 days 30 days is probably going to be your best option gives you a broader scope of what's out there now you can control what you're looking for uh you've got price range i generally just leave it open so we can have a look and see what the full scope things is uh feedback now let's see if you're looking to look at your competitors which is also good um we'll come to that in a couple of moments and you can look at fixed priced auction brand new used uh as well as excluding certain phrases that you don't want to be looking for so let's just say we're looking for base and sync taps so you've you've picked up a a set of sync taps so we want to have a look at this so let's go for it let's have a look so the system will then have a look across and it drills into eBay's platform looks at the sellers looks at the sales within that range and it brings up the top 100 selling listings from eBay within the last 30 days for us so we can see that the sale through rate is actually very high it's running at about 397 sell through rate they've sold 397 items and the average amount or sorry the total amount of sales in the last 30 days for those 397 sales was just under 13 grand okay now within the people's listings out there you can see that there is a 50 success rate so you've got a 50 50 chance to sell in your base and sync taps as long as they hit certain criteria within what you're listing so let's have a look down below you can see where the top competitors are the market share out there which is also good because it shows you the seller's name so you can actually look at that seller as well you can look at what they're selling what they're doing within the listings so you can look optimizing your listings for the specifics within the product that you're selling if you find a matched item here and then from there you can basically leverage your listing with the information within to be optimized to the best of what you're looking for now you can look at anything I'm just using this as just a straight off the top from that original screen when I was looking at it previously and let's have a look so we can see down below there's a lot of sellers here from China fine we can scroll through them so here we have a US seller so say let's just for the sake of this video you have this set of taps okay you've got a black set of these modern vanity taps so you can see expressio oh has them they've sold six of these in the last 30 days and since listing them they've sold 55 and they're running at a price of 33.98 so depending on where you're sourcing from you may have picked it up for five ten bucks whatever it is and you might say okay so what sort of price can I get for this so you can see that these are selling okay they're right around about 34 and you what you can actually do is you can scan the product for example and it will have a look at that product no products might you know serve a fair enough it has come back but either way so let's have a look at this one so we can see this one here now if I click on that title okay let's just click on that title so that's bringing up the listing that you've just looked at let's get rid of that that listing of those taps and you can see there are similar ones up here but they're all seem to be selling for around about $34 plus $13 shipping now you can see this is this particular one has got stock photos if you have your own I would probably suggest taking your own images ebay does prefer you to have your own images as opposed to stock photos because obviously you don't necessarily have the rights for that image but with this said let's have a look so we can see that this listing is running at $34 we can see what other items are similarly being sponsored on ebay as always and we can see the comparative ones here now we can see just from here looking along they are all around the $33 now this one is actually charging $30 for shipping now I think that's probably because I'm looking from the UK so you'd need to take that part with a pinch of salt but it's the selling cost of the item we're looking at here so you can see that it's telling you what items specifics they chose for that particular product what they have in listing so you can see all the information down below and they seem to be taking a lot of good tips here good best practices covering pretty much what's already in the item specifics which is a good tip to do which I've mentioned previously but you can use this so it's not just finding the competitor you can actually use it to optimize your listing for a comparative listing to make you competitive within your market now this is the point it's the research finding out how many sell how many of those particular products if that is something you've picked up what sort of profit margin you can make on it whatever it is yes I'm using taps for this example but it's not necessarily what we're looking for in your store but you can see that this particular seller is selling quite a few of these and that's the price they're getting they've solved 55 as you can see they've got 10 more available so obviously they've probably got a wholesale stock themselves but if you've got that set you can then gauge what you can make from your product so let's just come off for there for a moment so this is a phenomenally good piece of software now you can see straight away there's a slightly variation one there that's by top shower it's a Chinese supplier but either way not necessarily a drop shipper but a Chinese seller but you can see that they sold for about $29 and they sold 13 so even though they are Chinese doesn't matter you can see that your US platform US seller is getting full whack for them all right so there's a wealth of information and research here now just to take this aside for the moment I'm going to cover a couple of other points just on Zeke on this particular video for you without going into too much now you'd looked at the listing excuse me you've looked at the item specifics you've seen the price range they're going for so if you optimize to that listing that's the price range you're going to be looking at but with that as well just so you know down the side of your screen you've got your product research you've got your competitor research so if you have a regular competitor within products or a niche that you're selling in you can keep an eye on what they're selling what they're doing within their listings you've also got categories research so if there is a niche you're going into you can look at that niche within the software excuse me and you can see what's selling what's selling well what's selling seasonally and optimize your sourcing to fit your needs another massively important one here is title builder i'll quickly touch this one excuse me so we're to us so there's again you can you can fine tune this to suit your platform your country and your listings so ebay yes several things on there if you're selling on amazon so if you're not necessarily on ebay you're selling on amazon as well you could use this to optimize for your amazon listings so ebay united states 30 days and again you were looking at basin sink taps so if you press search on that what is going to start doing is it's going to look through the ebay platform look at its selling capacity now you can optimize your listing with the most searches okay because this is what you need to remember you're selling taps fine but you're not actually selling taps on ebay to a customer what you're doing is you're selling what they're looking for and what they're looking for are the words once you've got the words then you're selling your product okay you want the most searches the most visibility on the platform and it's all about that title the title can mean the difference between one price bracket and another price bracket on ebay when it's placing you in search so you can see down the side here that basin force it waterfall has had an average of nearly 9 000 searches just with those three keywords the competition is 12 people out there with that keyword and they sold 171 sales of that keyword okay now i know the product you specific product you're looking at that's fine but what i'm getting out here is look at these keywords this is how you build your title okay so you've got a basin force it okay so let's put that in it'll start building it and you can see the title contains 22 out of 80 characters so you know how many you've got left down the right hand side these are your generic keywords so when somebody types in force it there's actually 26 500 and you've got that in there so that's 26 and a half thousand searches right there you've got basin there's another 26 000 so you're up to 50 000 searches just on those first two words the waterfall is another 20 000 all of these have got 300 plus sales on as a result of what that customer's been looking for but from your initial search with these words now you might be looking at it might be a sink mixer tap so let's just say we put that in there for the sake of this building of title so you've got a basin force it waterfall sink mixer tap okay so now you've got sink mixer tap let's have a look down here sink is another 26 000 okay so strail for tap you're nearly looking at 100 000 searches just off that i've taken about five 10 seconds to build this title it may not be right you may need to juggle it around you may need to tweak it it might not work for you but it's a vanity sink mixer so you might want to put the vanity in the middle of there so let's just take that and put it in so there we go so we've got a basin force it waterfall vanity sinks mixer tap so now we're up to 44 we've still got half a title and we've already got one two three four five six seven eight key words already in the title huge research huge research tool it's a no-brainer this you should be using this for all of your titles this software on the platform is taken from ebay's data okay and it's looking at the last 30 days and that's where these figures are coming from the last 30 days so huge huge you can you can really optimize your titles just from this and as i guess as i say that's just one of the options on this platform no-brainer for me i use this a lot and it works very well anyway i've said i wanted to go through a little bit for you so here we have so that's the first two tips on the top 100 countdown on the first session here for you and i've given you a little bit information on teacanalytics that may be a benefit to you within your research terms okay guys thanks for staying with us keep you real