Free Ways to Find Out What Sells on eBay Part 2

This is the second installment in a series regarding the best free ways to find and determine which products you might want to sell on eBay, as far as the ones with the greatest potential to sell successfully and be profitable for you.

In other words, this article isn't specifically limited to discussing just the products that sell well on eBay, but the ones that sell well and are potentially viable to sell, even if you're new to eBay and/or selling online in general, and even if you have limited or no capital to invest up front to buy products at lower wholesale costs.

The first article in the series explained how to use the eBay Pulse page to find out which products/keywords are generating the most searches on eBay across the entire site, as well as within specific categories and sub-categories, and from those lists, how to zero in on which products/brands also demonstrate a low enough level of existing supply/listings on eBay that there might be room for added competition.

In this particular article, we're going to move on to another eBay page that's equally lesser-known but also very helpful in providing insight regarding potentially viable products to sell on eBay, the Want It Now (WIN) board.

Up until recently, the WIN board was visible and easily accessible from the eBay home page, so going forward, it may not be quite as beneficial as it has been in the past, but it's still worth reviewing on a regular basis.  It's a valuable tool in providing insight into what eBay buyers want but can't find on eBay, or can't find enough of already on the site.

These days, the easiest way to access the WIN board is just to go to http://ebay.com/wantitnow, where this is what you'll see at the top of the page:

Although both buyers and sellers can use the WIN board to either request or offer products, respectively, eBay has historically marketed the site primarily to buyers as a way for them to exercise some measure of control and have some input in determining which products are available on eBay. 

Of course, this is only successful if there are enough sellers who review the board on a regular basis and actually act on the requests buyers have made. 

One thing to keep in mind initially when you review the WIN board is that not every product requested by buyers on the board is one you can't currently find on eBay.  Whether through ignorance, laziness, or a combination of both, there are many, many requests on the board for items that are already currently listed on eBay.  

These types of requests are particularly easy to fulfill for sellers who already have these products listed themselves, since eBay has built in a functionality allowing sellers to respond to the requests by providing links, item numbers, or other indicators leading buyers to their existing listings that match the buyer's requests. 

Therefore, the most effective way to find viable products to sell based on the information on the WIN board is to compare the product requests with what's already listed on eBay.

Just like what you find elsewhere on eBay, there are a couple of different ways to review the buyer requests that have been posted on the WIN board, either by typing keywords into a search field or by browsing through the posts as they have been organized according to eBay's main categories. 

Obviously, if you already have some particular products in mind, the easiest way to find out how many buyers are requesting those products is to type keywords or keyword phrases relating to those items into the search field at the top of the WIN board:

For example, I'm going to type in "pandora" in the search field.  Next, I'm going to expand the dropdown menu and select "Jewelry & Watches" from the list.  Then I'll click "Search Want It Now".  The keyword "pandora" is one of the top 20 most popular searches within the Jewelry & Watches category on eBay, so let's see if that's also true on the WIN board.

First, though, here's what comes up for "pandora" within Jewelry & Watches:

This is a perfect example of how eBay searches can often yield very different results then WIN searches.  While the word "pandora" is one of the most popular searches on eBay, as you can see, there's only one WIN post within Jewelry & Watches with the term "pandora" in it. 

And as you can see, the word "pandora" doesn't even appear in the title of this WIN post.  But every WIN search automatically includes both titles and descriptions unless you opt out of searching them. 

In any event, this search shows us that it may not be very efficient to search popular keywords or phrases on the WIN board, since the results are often incompatible with eBay search results.

So instead, this time we're going to browse through one of the WIN categories instead, and that will hopefully give us a better idea of what some of the popular WIN posts really are:

Sticking with the same category as our earlier search, let's click on "Jewelry & Watches" and see what comes up:

Now we're getting somewhere!  Not only are there a healthy 203 WIN posts within Jewelry & Watches, but as you can see, in the left column, we can narrow down the search results by sub-category.  This is great, because as you can see, the list of results is quite varied and could take quite a while to weed through.

So let's click on "Designer Brands" and see what we get:

With 29 results under "Designer Brands", now we have a much more workable list of results.  And all you have to do is look in the left column to see which brands are represented on the list. 

So the next step is to take these 29 results and research them, preferably using a good eBay market research tool, which will tell you what the average selling price (ASP) and sell-through rate (also known as conversion rate or CR) of each item is.  If you can't afford to subscribe to a market research tool, some of them offer free trial periods in which you can get a lot of research done without having to pay anything.  If that doesn't work, you can at least browse through the completed listings on eBay to get a pretty good idea of how successful the items have been on eBay in the past 15 days, and about how much buyers have been paying for the items.  

In any event, after researching the 29 items on the list, you'll be able to narrow it down to include only the items with a sell-through rate of at least 50%.  Then you can take the modified list of items and start browsing through various dropshippers' websites, comparing the dropshippers' prices with the average selling price of each item on your list. 

If any of the price differences indicate a potential profit margin of at least 10%, AFTER eBay and PayPal fees, those could be great products to start listing on eBay.

Obviously, there's no such thing as a 100% guarantee, but if you do your due diligence and research potential products thoroughly and methodically, you can take as much of the guesswork out of the equation as possible and tip the scales in your favor.