Research on eBay and affiliate marketing

I had written a post about researching before getting in to anything that makes you money online. Most of my posts are now about affiliate marketing and eBay as I am making most of my money using these ways. Targeting your audience is very important. There are many people who have very good traffic to their product sites but the kind of sale they make is very bad. I have met people who get more that 1000 unique visitors per day but end up making no sales for the entire month. The kind of traffic is also important. When you start a product selling website, you need to ensure whether people coming to your website will actually buy the product or no. I remember a post by Zac Johnson where he had written about "will you think of buying things from your own website". Then there was a post from Shoemoney which talks about asking your friends and family members about a website. Don't tell them its yours and get an honest opinion from them on whether they would actually buy something of that website.

In this post I am talking about a little research I have done on eBay which actually helped me in stopping what I was really planning to start from next week. While doing this research, I also concluded that there are people on the Internet which can be targeted easily as there are very few players working on that area. Here is the research part:

Since I am in India, I was planning to sell few products on eBay.in. To check the prices on eBay sold items, I went to www.ebay.in, clicked on advance search, checked the box that says show only completed listings and hit enter. Doing this brings down a list of recently ended auctions for my product. Doing so will list down the products with two colors i.e. green and red. Green means the auction has ended successfully where someone has actually bougt the product. Red means the acution has ended without the product being sold. I was pretty shocked to see that 100% of the recently ended auctions for my product were red. This means no one has bought that product from eBay India recently.

Well, maybe my product is bad and noone actually buys it from eBay. Now I went to http://pulse.ebay.com where it lists the most sold products on eBay. The first listed there was iPod. Now lets see how many iPods are sold recently on eBay India. Out of the first 25 listings on first page, I can see that 5 are in green which means. Atleast 5 iPods or iPod products are sold which is a good sign compared to my product I searched.

Now lets check how other countries are doing with eBays most selling product. So I did the same research on eBay US, eBay UK, eBay AU and eBay SG. Results are shown below (taken only from the first page):

eBay US - 20 Sold

eBay UK - 13 Sold

eBAY SG - 14 Sold

eBAY AU - 16 Sold.

Now lets check the competition for the tem 'ipod' in various countries. First we start with US by going to http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&q=ipod&adtest=on&gl=US. What we see is 100s of advertisers already spening money for this term. Remember the number of items sold in eBay US and compare. Not a great choice to enter this market.

UK - http://www.google.co.uk/search?adtest=on&hl=en&gl=Uk&q=ipod&btnG=Search&meta=. I see only six paid advertisers here which means an iPOD website targetting UK audience can be a good choice.

SG - http://www.google.com.sg/search?adtest=on&hl=en&gl=sg&q=ipod&btnG=Search&meta=. Just two paid ads out of which one is Apple and the other one is Citibank. Now buying a .sg domain and some basic SEO could do wonders for me in this niche targetting people on Singapore only. From our eBay research, we did conclude that people from Singapore do onlne shopping as much as people in UK.

AU - http://www.google.com.au/search?adtest=on&hl=en&gl=au&q=ipod&btnG=Search&meta=. Just ONE paid ad which is from Apple. People in Australia do buy a lot as per our conclusion above and there is not much competetion. Entering this niche and targeting Australians would be a GREAT idea.

IN - http://www.google.co.in/search?adtest=on&hl=en&gl=in&q=ipod&btnG=Search&meta=. Just ONE ad that too of eBay. This means the competetion is less and so are the buyers (only 5) so entering this area can be good but not much  profitable.

Using my above method you can research on your products and accordingly target your audience. You can try the same with other countries like HK, BR etc.

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