Sometimes it’s painful to look at your eBay cometitors’ listings, especially if they seem to be doing better than you are. It can make you feel defeated and wonder if you can really be competitive … WAIT A MINUTE! It’s absolutely wonderful to be able to look at your competitors’ listings on eBAY because that’s how you can figure out what’s working and what’s not working, then use all of that strategic intelligence to accelerate your own selling performance! So, put on your analytic hat and start learning from your competitors.

Analyse the competition

There are four effective ways to analyse your eBay competitors listings:

Visit your eBay category of interest and from the left menu tick the checkbox ‘Completed Listings’. This will show all the listings in your chosen category that ended recently. Look at all the listings with a green price. Green means that the auction or BIN listing ended in a successful sale. Evaluate, by taking notes, which products sold most successfully.

An alternative method to finding completed listings is to use eBay’s advanced search feature: search your desired keyword, checking the ‘completed listings only’ box and setting the minimum number of bids to ‘1′. (No point in looking at listings that received no bids.) Go through the results carefully (again ignore prices in red - when the price is shown in red it means the auction didn’t close with a sale.) and take notes. Both this method and the first method can be a bit tedious, since you have to do everything manually.

A third, newer, method is to browse your chosen eBay category and observe which listings on page 1 and 2 of your category have the longest end date. eBay now ranks listings based on how successful they have been in the past (they no longer rank listings based only on how soon the listing will end). By observing which listings on page 1 and 2 of your preferred category have the longest end date, you can automatically know which products / bundles are performing well. If you can beat those sellers prices (or offer, by selling a bundle with extra bonuses at a higher price) you can have your auction feature on the first two pages of the eBay results for as long as 30 days, receiving maximum exposure.

A fourth, more stable, method is to use market research services like the eSources Market Research Wizard. These services allow you to specify a keyword to obtain statistical data on success rates and average selling prices for your chosen products on eBay. Identify which categories are best for your products, which categories will yield the best sale prices, when is the best time to start and end your auction, for what duration, and much more.

Additional Strategies To Outperform Your eBay Competitors

Titles

Titles are incredibly important. They create the keywords that will bring searchers to the product. Copy the titles and look for commonalities. Are there keywords you should be using? Are they paying for bolding, a subtitle, highlighting? The eSources Market Research Wizard reveals how much extra return you can expect from each extra eBay listings feature, helping you maximise your spend.

Descriptions

How are your competitors descriptions written? Are they long, short, terse, friendly? How much information is given?

Time

When did the auction start and end? How long was the auction? What days of the week were involved? You can again try the eSources Market Research Wizard to reveal the best start and end times for your products.

Pictures

How many views are there? What kind of quality is involved? Anything special about the setting?

Price

What’s the price range? Do the variations in price correlate with condition of the item, special circumstances, special offers or anything else?

Shipping

How are your competitors handling shipping? Are high delivery charges correlated with lower pricing? If so, you know why the price is lower. Which shipping strategies seem to be working the best?

Analysis

Now that you’ve gathered the information, look for tactics that you can use to your advantage as well.

For example:

Are you using the keywords that successful sellers are using?
Are successful sellers consistently using any differentiating feature that you are not, such as subtitles or bolding?
Do your pictures measure up to photos from the most successful sellers?
Are your prices competitive? Is there a way to use price to your advantage?

Once you have a list of proven tactics, you may want to try them all together to get the biggest advantage or, if there is expense involved, you may want to test one or two at a time to see what works best for you, giving you the best cost/benefit ratio.

Take example from your successful eBay competitors and try replicating their strategies to your advantage.

If you are an Internet retailer, a storefront retailer who also has a website, a mail order retailer or a catalogue company, you may find the concept of drop shipping attractive. After all, drop shipping eliminates the need to buy inventory, store it, and ship it out yourself. Working with a good manufacturer, importer or wholesaler that will drop ship offers numerous benefits, including low overhead costs and higher profit margins than you might realize through regular affiliate programs. The beauty of using such a service is that it allows you to focus time, resources, and energy on building and expanding your customer base and not on sending out products you have already sold.

The drop shipping process involves four basic steps:

You advertise specific products and take orders for those products.
Upon making the sale, you receive your money.
You then send the order along with the money for the wholesale and shipping costs to the manufacturer, importer or wholesaler.
They ship the product directly to the customer.
It is a simple, efficient process. That is as long as you are working with a quality, trustworthy drop shipper. If you end up contracting with an unreliable company or a scam artist, your reputation, profit margin, and entire enterprise can suffer and be destroyed. When deciding which companies you will conduct business with, there are a few practices of which you should be wary.

Most often you will be looking to work with a few companies or perhaps even one company whose products you will represent and sell. In essence you are marketing specific goods with the resulting sales benefiting your company and the manufacturer, importer, or wholesaler.

With this in mind, you should never be required to purchase a membership in order to sell another company’s products (there are some exceptions to this rule: for a list of legitimate dropshippers visit our dropship suppliers and dropshippers directory). The types of companies that charge such fees usually say they offer a complete array of goods backed up by a marketing department. They will even include your own e-commerce website that you can use to sell their items. Such turnkey businesses are replete with large initiation and setup costs, monthly membership fees, and other hidden expenses. Additionally, you are often only allowed to offer their products on their site.

Does anyone ever make a profit from these turnkey businesses? Yes, the people who sell them to unwitting retailers make large sums of money. Do not fall for this scam. The only fees you should ever be charged are those for the product and for shipping the product. Legitimate drop shippers may charge you a fee, which is however refundable once you have commenced trading.

Additionally, never pay a drop shipper a membership or license fee for the right to have them drop ship for you. The concept sounds ridiculous, and it should. It’s another con. They are already making a profit from the effort you are putting into selling their product, why should you pay a license fee for the right to have them ship that product? Should you pay for the shipping? Of course, but that should be on a per item or shipment basis and no additional charges should apply.

There are also lists of bogus drop shippers that are sold to potential retailers. A legitimate business can spend hundreds of dollars on such lists, which are really names of middlemen posing as drop shippers. Contracting through these sham shippers will result in you paying much more than you should for your products.

You may also be tempted to buy relatively cheap lists of drop shippers. These lists are inexpensive because they contain out-of-date and/or false information. When you try to contact the companies on the list, you will find that they have gone out of business or never even existed.

Finally, whatever companies you contract with, make sure that you have it in writing that the manufacturer, importer or wholesaler will not market to your customers. The customers you directly sell to and the drop shipper, through your order, ships to, belong to you and not them. You have done all of the ground and legwork to sell to your customers and usurping them is not an option open to your drop shipper. Any legitimate company will agree to and honor such a contract.

Be sure to ask companies about their drop shipping policies, including charges, length of time for delivery, return polices, and backordering procedure.

One of the down sides of buying on-line rather than on the high street is the need to pay delivery costs. This downside is often compounded by e-tailers who try to make a lot of additional profit by adding a substantial ‘handling fee’ to the delivery costs. In fact, there’s nothing that makes an eshopper more angry then deciding to purchase an item and finding out that the delivery and handling charges have removed any savings they thought they were getting. Here are some tips for handling delivery that can increase your sales as well as boosting customer confidence in you as a seller.

Be clear

State your delivery policies in your description. Don’t make people guess about how your delivery policies work.

Use an easy-to-understand calculation method, if possible

If you sell products that are relatively uniform in weight or size, you can create a chart that tells people what to expect, e.g.:

1-5 jewelry items 3.50
6-10 jewelry items 6.50

This type of chart actually gives buyers an incentive to buy more because they will pay the same delivery for one or five items. (You will need to set your prices so that you recoup your extra delivery costs.)

You can make a similar chart by weight, if your items tend to have different weights. (Remember to list the weight in your description so your buyer can easily determine the fee.)

However you choose to handle delivery charges, be sure that your delivery cost is clear. Today, most Internet buyers have an option to sort search results by price + shipping. An item with a blank or unspecified delivery cost field will rank lower in this buyer optional sort.

Shipping Calculator

You can add a postage calculator to your description so that the user can accurately predict the delivery charge. Your programmer can easily create a custom script that easily calculates postage and packaging charges based on number of units, weight or a combination of both.

Encourage combined shipping

Unless you are a seller who makes a good profit on delivery charges and handling, you should encourage combined shipping to save buyers money on the delivery charges. This method is also an excellent way to create urgency by encouraging buyers to purchase more products today so they can save on the delivery costs.

NOTE: One of the underlying assumptions of combined shipping is that you have a wide enough variety of products available to provide buyers the opportunity for multiple purchases.

If you are an eBay seller and tend to list a certain number of items each week in order to spread out the listing burden over the month, you may want to consider listing in larger batches so that your customers have more to choose from at any given point in time.

Try shipping promotions

The more ways you can diminish the burden of delivery, the better. If you can afford it, try a ‘free delivery this week’ promotion to move excess product in your inventory. Or, ’spend 100 and delivery is free’. Encourage additional purchases with an offer of, ‘buy 5 or more and shipping is free’.

Finally, the more ways that you can show your customers that you are ‘on their side’ when it comes to saving money on shipping, the more trust you will build, and with trust come purchases.