Which Colour/Style/Size Sells BEST on eBay?

Happy Monday everyone!

In today’s post I want to quickly cover one trick to use when you’re doing market research on eBay and there are VARIATIONS of the product, like:

• Size
• Colour
• Style
• Design
• Etc.

Now when you do your research in Terapeak, you’ll get data for the product itself, but not exact data for each variation. This is because Terapeak uses listing titles, or to be precise – the keywords used in titles, to generate data for you.

Obviously this won’t give you the full picture on which particular variation sells best.

But why would you want to know this anyway?

Well, there are several reasons, but the two main ones are if:

• You’re on a limited budget and can’t afford to start selling ALL variations of a product. So you would want to find the best sellers and start with them.

• You have the buying power to purchase all variations BUT you obviously still don’t want to buy them in equal quantities, i.e. 100 of each, as they won’t sell equally well. This will mean wasting a large portion of your budget on variations that aren’t that popular and will take a long time to shift.

So how do we get this data on which variation sells best?

Thankfully there’s a very easy and quick way to get this done!

All you have to do is find the 3-5 best-selling listings for that product (or a similar product if no one currently sells your version on eBay) and go to the SOLD/selling history page. You can access this by clicking on this link within each listing:

Then once you click on that link, you’ll be presented with a page showing the last 100 sales for that listing (that’s if there has been at least 100 sales).

And as you can see – the variations are listed for each of those 100 sales, so you can easily see which ones are the most popular.

To turn this info into usable data you have to manually count the sales for each variation and then simply turn that number into a percentage, which is incredibly simple seeing as there are 100 sales to look at!

For example:

• 65 black
• 25 white
• 5 blue
• 5 pink

All together – 100 sales (100%).

Now simply turn this into a percentage:

• 65 black – 65%
• 25 white – 25%
• 5 blue – 5%
• 5 pink – 5%

Now you know exactly how well each variation sells! In the example of having a small budget, you can clearly see that white and black outsell the other 2 colours so you would want to start with black & white versions (or even just black as it’s the most popular variation by far).

OR if you have the buying power, you’ll know how to SPLIT your order to match the market’s demand. For example if you can afford to import 1000 pieces, you would split your order like this:

• black – 650 pieces (65%)
• white – 250 pieces (25%)
• blue – 50 pieces (5%)
• pink – 50 pieces (5%)

IMPORTANT!!! Make sure you do this on the top selling listings – the ones that have sold the most items, as that will give you the most reliable numbers.

There will always be some fluctuation of course, but by using this method you can get a pretty accurate picture on how each variation sells.

If there are no listings on eBay for the exact product you want to sell, simply use similar products as customer choices will be very similar.

If it’s a very small niche and no one has sold 100 units so far under one listing, you can still do this, you simply need to carry out one extra calculation to turn your result into a %.

For example – there are only 50 items sold under a listing’s selling history:

• 25 black
• 15 white
• 5 blue
• 5 blue

What you need to do to turn these into a percentage is use the following formula:

25 (number of sales for black) divided by 50 (total sales) multiplied by 100.

25/50 x 100 = 50%

Easy, right!? 🙂

You can of course use Excel or any other spreadsheet to calculate this for you automatically.

Just ensure you alter the figures to take into account the total amount sold!

This is a very simple market research method but it’s incredibly effective! And when you use it together with Terapeak’s main research functions, you can really accurately nail down the exact product to sell.

Lastly – this method can also be used in another situation, unrelated to variations, when you simply want to get an idea of the potential of a product.

While Terapeak’s competitor research is obviously ideal for this, sometimes you may want to just quickly get a rough idea of the monthly sales.

So you simply pick a listing from the first page of results, one that is similar to the product/specification/price you’ll be offering, and just check the date range from the most recent sale to the oldest one (100th):

————————————————————————

As you can see, this listing sold 100 units in the last 2 days, which means roughly 1500 per month (100/2 x 30).

That is the real market potential for this product, provided you can match the offer and achieve a decent ranking in the search results.

And again, if there are less than 100 sales, you can still calculate it in the exact same way – just work out the number of sales per day and times it by 30 to make a month.

I hope this all makes sense!

If you have any questions related to this eBay market research strategy, feel free to post them below in the comments section.

Have an awesome week everyone!

Andrew