By Mike Ralph

When researching a product to sell on ebay one of the important things that you need to know is ‘what will it sell for?’ Obviously no one can guarentee this selling price but Ebay gives you the tools to get a good idea.

The background to this is that a friend has been made redundent and has decided that he will make his living on ebay, which contrary to popular thought is still very much a possibility. His idea is simple, he is advertising to do house clearences and unwanted item removal with a view to selling this on at both offline auctions and Ebay.

He was voicing some concerns over the fact that he obviously has some in depth knowledge in certain areas but in others he has none and hence he didn’t want to be paying to much and leaving himself no profit. So I walked him through a feature that is readily available to all Ebayers and one that is seldomly used to the full.

The feature is the Closed Item Search…..simple really.

This allows the question, “What is something worth?” to be answered quickly and as accurately as is humanly possible. It really is like having a crystal ball supplied by Ebay.

Let me give an example, take the Samsung D600 Mobile Phone..

Log into Ebay and in the search box at the top just type in Samsung D600 Mobile Phone. At this point try to think how the listing titles would be written so as to get the ‘complete’ set of results that will give you your expected selling prices accurately.

Hit the search button..

What this does is bring up the current auction listings that are active for your chosen search term, scroll down the screen on the left hand side and click the box that says “Completed Listings” and then hit the Show Items button. (you may have to enter your Ebay username at this point)

Then click the Price column twice and this sorts the data into ascending format, ie. the highest to the lowest selling price. Like always green means it was sold and red means that it wasn’t.

What you have now is a guide to the expected highest selling price and the lowest selling price and pretty easily determine the average selling price, obviously some of the selling prices will be slightly skewed (particularly in the mobile phone example used) due to the ‘must have’ effect but generally these are very easy to identify and eliminate.

A quick click around the completed auctions can also give you an idea of the best selling formats, titles, categories to list in ect so that you are furthur armed to maimise your Ebay profits.

Now then using my friend as an example. Say he gets a call off someone wanting to dispose of a certain number of items he can, whilst still on the phone, determine his likely selling prices and be able to give them a price that he knows he can make money on…..even if he has never sold that product before.

When it comes to Ebay remember that most people see Ebay as a benchmark as to what they are willing to pay and hence what the value of any goods are. So using this simple but effective free tool you will be able to give yourself the chance of going into a sale pretty much confident as to what you are going to get back money wise.

It really is like having a crystal ball..

Mike - Webmaster and eBay Power Seller at Ebay Selling

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Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Mike_Ralph

Firstly I apologize for being away for a few days–I had a couple of things come up–Wedding Anniversary and Valentine’s Day to be exact! Can’t ignore those and expect to survive!

If you want to make the most money you can on eBay, then you need to know what sells. But how can you find that out?

The Manual Way.

If you’re just starting out, you might find it easier to simply go to your category, tick ‘Completed listings’ in the left-hand menu, and then click the ‘Show items’ button. Sort them by highest price first, and there you have it: the items that sell for the highest prices. In most categories this will change often, but it’s still useful to know – if you think you can get an item quickly for less than the kind of prices it is selling for, then go for it.

eBay’s search interface can be slow and hard to use, however, and you’re unlikely to discover everything you could learn this way. There’s more than one way to do things, though.

The Statistical Way.

If you’d prefer to do a little hardcore statistical analysis to determine what’s selling and what not, then don’t worry – you can do that too.

eBay make all their market data available to third-party developers through what’s called a ‘programming interface’ – this basically means that you have a wide choice of programs that can take market statistics from eBay and analyse them for you. Type ‘ebay analysis’ into a search engine for a long list.

In my opinion, some of the best eBay statistics tools out there are made by Andale (www.andale.com). Andale are one of the oldest and most established sellers of services for eBay. However, their solution is web-based, and you may prefer to buy a piece of software that you can install on your computer, such as Auction Intelligence.

These automated programs will almost do everything for you, and come with help and tutorials. You should be aware, however, that eBay charge them for the data, which means that they will never give you their programs for free.

Keep Your Finger on Pulse.

If you want a quick, big-picture snapshot of what people are looking to buy on eBay, then go to The eBay Pulse. This is a page where eBay lists the top 10 most searched for words, and the top 5 largest eBay stores.

Looking at it, it’s easy to spot current trends. For example, right now all of the top stores are selling media items, either books or music. That suggests that these are good things to be selling, at least if you want to shift volume. Right now the word ‘ipod’ is on the list – there are a heck of a lot of people out there looking for a cheap iPod or iPod mini. If you could find a good supplier for them then you could make a lot of money.

If you’re having trouble finding suppliers, though, don’t worry: there’s more than one way to get hold of things to sell on eBay. My future entries will give you a few tips.

John