Research Labs bug

Hi everyone,

I am new to salehoo and have been dabbling with the research lab tools.

I am worried about the market research data reported in the labs as every single product idea (anitques, furniture, mp3 players etc.) that I tried to look up returns 'Very low' competition. Seriously, mp3 players is considered very low competitive to trade in?...I find that hard to believe!

I paid mainly for the research labs but it seems like the intelligence provided is not correct. Can someone please explain as I am very confused.

Many thanks folks,
Iman

Hi and welcome to the site, imanbahrani :)

The data that comes up in the research lab is based on the actual number of listings on eBay. I don't think there is a bug. It might just happen that based on the total number of listings the item you searched for has very low competition.

I tried the keyword 'antiques' and got this result for competition -

eBay US Very High
eBay UK Low
eBay Canada Very High
eBay Australia Very Low

You might find this helpful -

Link hidden: Login to view

Cheers!

Hi Richelle,

Thanks for the reply.

We all know how saturated the market is with the mp3 players and ipod accessories but the competition rating for both those terms is showing as very low.

The point of market research is to know where to jump in order to make profits and this can be highly misleading and give a false start to folks like me wanting to get started if it tells us that competition for ipod accessories for instance is very low and demand is very high. See what I mean?

Hi again imanbahrani,

Just heard from our head developer, he said that the lab is currently being redeveloped and the version that is online is a beta version - so it's not 100% complete.

Hope this helps :)

Ok thanks for the heads up on this.

Can you please advise when this will be fixed as I paid solely to get access to the labs and not the wholesalers directory.

I am surprised it was not mentioned that the labs is in beta. Other people conducting market research can be misled by the anomalies in the data reports.

Hi imanbahrani,

According to our head developer, there is not set date yet.

But once it goes live it will no longer be offered as an unlimited access option. Each member will have a limited number of free searches per month.

Cheers :)

Perhaps I am doing this wrong. I typed in "settlers of catan", which is a board game and has plenty of completed sales. the labs came up empty. Like the OP my wife and I also purchased this for the labs. They don't seem to be functioning properly.

Hello findithere73,

It could be that the keyword settlers of catan has reached its universal limit. The Reserach Labs also returned with dashes when I searched for this keyword. However when I searched for settlers of catan board game the lab returned very promising results :)

Kindly refer to this Link hidden: Login to view

Some times you also need to play with your keywords a bit when you use the labs or do any searches online.

Hope this helps!