What to sell?


duran6828
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8 Mar 14 05:29:50 am
I became a member about two month ago
I don't know how to start or what to buy from a whole seller can some one held me


Last edited by fudjj on 9 Mar 14 08:47:54 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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armanx23
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9 Mar 14 04:40:18 pm
The best way to start really depends on where you sell. For example if you sell on eBay, the best way to start is by selling things from around the house that you no longer need. You will be surprised how much you make!

Starting this way will help you get a hang of the eBay environment.

What you can buy from whole sellers really depend on what your niche is. I sell on eBay and started with selling electronic items, than somehow ended up selling cosmetics. So now I sell both. So the question really is what do you want to sell? Once you decide on what you want to sell you can do some research on eBay by checking the completed listings to see how much it sold for and how much demand it has.

So much more info to give but so little time! :) You can message me if you would like more info!


fudjj
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9 Mar 14 08:46:01 pm
Hi and welcome both of you to the forum,

Nelson, it's not unusual to struggle to find your place in the market when getting started. It does take plenty of research. That said, the advice given by Mohammad is exactly what I would also suggest. It's a great way to get started and depending on what you can find to sell, make a little cash to put back into other products possibly.

The only thing I would actually add to Mohammad's advice is that it doesn't just come down to what you want to sell. Sometimes what you want to sell in this game just isn't possible for one reason or another, so research is king. Not just your competitors, but also your suppliers as you don't just have to find a market, you have to find a supply resource that will allow you to compete in that market and budget is quite often the biggest hurdle sellers face.


Mark (fudjj)

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carattop
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11 Mar 14 09:38:25 pm
@Duran - This is a typical issue that most starter sellers face prior to learning. As Marc and everyone else might point out, your biggest burner could be investment in products that may not sell. Performing you basic research is 100% vital. Please also keep your emotions out of business. Just because we think something might (the keyword being might and not will) sell well, it does not necessarily sell well in the market. So research is vital. In research I would recommend classifying your research into Feasible Products, Feasible Prices.

It is important to find the right product at the right price to be able to make money online. So I cannot insist enough in you investing time and effort in research. Ok. I can see your face turning red. So Enough of advice :)

If you are looking to sell on Ebay, the easiest way to research is to use ebay itself. Tools like Terapeak ans Salehoo labs will do the trick too and given that you have a members in this community, you might as well leverage the salehoo labs. In ebay, you can perform basic research by searching for a product under any product category. It will throw out a couple of results and at this point, you should start focusing on the left side panel (the filter options) that ebay provides. Select New with Tags (NWT), New w/o tags, refurbished, others etc. Depending on your needs, play around with these filters to see what is currently being offered on ebay.

As next step, scroll down further on the left panel filters and select "sold listings only". This will give you list of products that have sold under the product category you are researching. It could be intimidating as the list of sold out products could run to pages. But remember, the long tail story. There is always a market big enough for a small player. With this, it should give you some basic idea on what products sell under the category and at what price.

The top of this search results page also holds some vital filters like Buy it now, Auction listing, All listing and then a sort function that would allow you to see results by highest priced, lowest priced, most recent (end date) etc.

One thing to keep in mind is that eBay is an extremely competitive marketplace. While ebay and amazon pretty much dominate this area of online market place, ebay is a little more relaxed than amazon when it comes to product photography requirements or listing guidelines though typically products tend to sell higher on amazon.

My recommendation is not to pay money for research. I did and burnt atleast a couple of hundred dollars trying to learn from the so called expert reports. I would not recommend going that route. Invest time into research and learning. Members in this forum would be more than happy to help share knowledge (atleast I would). So feel free to write to me or respond to queries in this forum and I will be happy to help you in anyway I can.


Bharath Balakrishnan
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DBA Great Minds, Texas
info@kukucloset.com

toennies27
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12 Mar 14 02:01:43 pm
Hello I was wondering if there is a way to just use the webiste to advertise a business not to sell anything for example if some one wanted to get a quote on cleaning . How would i do that or should i search for a diffrent kind of source?!


carattop
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12 Mar 14 03:16:23 pm
@toennies27 - Are you referring to a website like this - Link hidden: Login to view

Allow me to please restate my understanding of your question and you could correct me if I'm wrong. You are a service business (specifically cleaning service business). you don't sell any products but would like a simple site that would allow people to connect with you and request a quote for your cleaning services. Is this your situation and requirement right now?

If the above statement is true - Here is my recommendation.

a) Identify cleaning service websites within your specific locality. Simple go to google.com and search for cleaning services followed by your zip code. There should be atleast a 100 results that pop up. This would tell you, your average competition.

b) Look at the website of the top 3 of your competitors (top 3 results). I'm assuming you are not in the results there or you wouldn't be asking advisory.

c) when you go to each competitor website page - hit Ctrl+U; This should open up their html code for the page. Use scroll function or Ctrl F (find) and search for keywords. Make a list of these keywords. Alternatively you could use google adwords research tool to identify keywords too.

d) Please note that identifying the right keywords is the key to your business coming up in top of search results. The keywords shouldn't be high competition (bcoz ur starting off) at the same time (shouldn't be too low say a number like 10) that it does not justify your time investment. Invest time into this activity.

This is the initial part of the research in a nut shell you need to perform. Then comes creating a website (depending on your needs), onpage optimization for your website, then off page optimization through link building, content marketing, video marketing etc....Basically there a million ways to market.

I will refrain from commenting further without knowing more about your business. But I do hope this helps you.


Bharath Balakrishnan
Ebay Store - Link hidden: Login to view
Founder - Link hidden: Login to view
DBA Great Minds, Texas
info@kukucloset.com

 

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