One of the key steps to perform before you start selling products on eBay is market research. Despite being an excellent way to discover things that sell on eBay, most sellers fail to do this step because it can take a significant amount of time. But skipping market research may cause you to be stuck with a stash of products without buyers, certainly not a good situation to be in. 

When doing market research to find things that sell on eBay, we are researching the audience, the item itself, and the competition. Following are the steps for conducting research on eBay. 

1. Brainstorming. You may or may not already have few ideas of the items that you want to list on eBay. If you don’t know where to start, remember that the best things that sell on eBay are niche products. Niche items are those that appeal to just a small part of the market, but this segment is a highly targeted audience. You can start off by selling niche products to a few customers and later widen your product range. 

2. Verify past selling history. Once you come up with some ideas of the items to sell, make sure that they have enough demand on eBay by searching through eBay’s completed auctions. You may need to set aside a couple of hours to do the research but this tool will give you some ideas of excellent things that sell on eBay. When you go to eBay’s website, click on the ‘Advanced’ link beside the search bar. Key in the item name, tick the checkbox for ‘Completed listings’ under the ‘Search including’ section and click the ‘Search’ button. ticking the ‘Completed listings’ checkbox means you are looking for the products in the past auction history instead of in the active auctions. 

3. Analyze the results. After the results are shown, scroll through 4 or 5 pages and make a note the numbers of products sold. If the products were sold, their prices will be displayed in green instead of red for the unsold products. 

If the items were sold at least 60% of the time, you have found potentially profitable eBay products. 

4. Start over. If you discover the right products to sell, shift your focus to find a supplier. Otherwise repeat the search for another product idea until you discover the right products. 

Performing market research may seem tedious and unnecessary but remember that not doing market research can be detrimental to your business in the long run.