Analyzing your competition is a crucial part of your eBay selling journey. However, it is often tough for beginners to carry out the process effectively. Contrary to popular opinion, you don’t need huge manpower or large budgets to get the most out of your analysis.
In fact, you can get detailed information on your competitors by spending just a few hours on your computer. By using modern tools and taking a data-driven approach, you can get a complete overview of your competitor’s strengths and limitations without much hassle.
Today we will discuss the importance of carrying out a competitive analysis for dominating your niche on eBay and figure out the top ways you can analyze your competitor’s marketing strategies in order to sell better.
So without further ado, let’s jump right into it.
Importance Of Competitive AnalysisÂ
Analyzing your competition on the eBay marketplace allows you to discover the hidden trends that can increase your sales and give you a better idea of your customers. Once you can determine what marketing strategies work best, you will be able to optimize your store and products to attract more customers.
Prioritize Customers Over Competitors
Your main job throughout your competition research is to determine what your potential audience is looking for in a specific niche. Once you figure out your customers buying patterns and your competitor’s selling trends you will be able to drive up your sales and bring in more long-term customers.
Competitor analysis and market research also allow you to determine where your eBay competitor lags. It’s important to learn from other people’s mistakes instead of falling into the same traps.
Things to Keep in Mind
eBay Competitor research is a thorough task so you need to ask yourself a few questions when carrying out the research like who are your most popular competitors? What are their best-selling items? And how much do they make per item?
Once you have created a detailed profile of your competitor, you will be able to create strategies to stand out from the competition and run your online store efficiently. Thankfully, in today’s digital world, you will be able to carry out your research with a single, powerful tool.
Let’s see how Zik Analytics can help you dominate the competition.
Using a Powerful Tool like Zik Analytics
Doing all your research manually is a serious hindrance to the progress of your eBay business. Furthermore, it is not a guarantee that your research will drive fruitful results. You are likely to waste a lot of time only to reach a dead end.
Rest assured that your most successful competitors are already using powerful tools to stay ahead. If you want to get the most out of your analysis consider investing in a popular tool like Zik Analytics.
Zik Analytics has a bunch of powerful features that guide you through every process of your eBay selling journey. From finding your next high-potential product to figuring out the best strategies to optimize your store, there is little you cannot achieve with this tool.
The highlight of today’s article is how you can research your competition so let’s see how Zik Analytics can help you out.
How To See Your Competitor’s Best Selling Items?
The most straightforward way of researching your competition is going to the Competitor Research tool by choosing the option from the icons on the left side of the screen. Here you can directly input the eBay seller’s name, choose a date range (from 7-30 days) and click on the search icon.
You will immediately get a detailed overview of the seller’s history for the allotted period. As you can tell from the image below, you can see the Sell Through rate, Active Listings, Sale Earnings, Successful Listings, and much more.
You can also add this seller to your Watchlist so you don’t have to search for the seller again and again.
Now to check the best-selling items of your competitors, you have to scroll down a bit. This list shows you the titles and the pictures of the best-selling products. On the right side, you can see the Upload Date, Total Sold, Current Price, Competition, and more.
Discover Best Sellers for your Product
If you have just begun your eBay business, you may not have a clear idea of your competitors. Zik Analytics can help you in this regard too by giving you a list of the most successful eBay sellers based on the product you are trying to sell.
To take advantage of this feature, simply go to the Product Research tool from the icons on the left. Here type in a product (e.g. fishing lures) or niche (e.g. fishing) and adjust the filters according to your liking.
You can set the Shipping Location, Price Range, Listing Type, Condition, and much more.
Now you will see an overview of the product/niche with information like Sell Through rate, Listings, Sold Items, Sale Earnings, and more. The most important feature for you is the competitor chart and graph.
This pie chart gives you an overview of the competitors that are dominating the niche whereas the graph tells you the number of sales in any given period. The data displayed is empirical in making powerful decisions that can boost your success on eBay.
Best-Selling Items List
Now you can scroll down to see the top sellers listed alongside their best-selling items. You will see the Seller Name, Number of Feedbacks, and Number of Sales on the right side of the list followed by an image of the item, 30-day Sales, Lifetime Sales, and more.
You will also notice the Scan Seller button right next to the seller name simply click on this icon to start researching a particular seller.
Scanning a Seller
By clicking on the Scan Seller button, you will immediately be redirected to the seller’s profile. You will notice it looks similar to the profile we see when we directly search for a seller by name.
However, using this method you won’t have to manually find and search for each competitor separately. We recommend using the Watchlist option to save any successful seller. This way you can visit the seller after a week or month to check for updates.
Using all the data from these steps, you can figure out new ways to list your items to maximize your product’s potential. For example, you can bundle the product with similar items, add new variations, etc. to stand out from the competition while still providing value to the buyers.
Identifying Best Selling Practices
After all said and done, it’s now time to use the imperial data to create strategies for your product. The data is only useful if you know how to properly utilize it. The main focus here is to look for opportunities where we can learn from our competitors.
Sold Items and Sale Earnings
First of all, we will analyze the competitor’s total revenue and sales data. The more the revenue, the more their selling profit will be. As in the picture below, the total revenue of $6,580 indicates a decent profit margin.
The Sales Earnings are not the best indicator of a seller’s real potential. You must combine this with the Sold Items to get an estimate of how successful the seller is.
For example, in the image above, the seller has sold over a thousand items, which is excellent considering the products belong to the fishing niche.
Average Price and Products Sold
Another thing to note is that the Sales Earnings don’t seem as high based on the products sold. This allows us to determine that the seller mainly sells less expensive products and makes a profit based on the total number of sales.
We can confirm this fact by looking at the Average Price which is relatively low sitting at around $6.52. This average price is pretty decent since the seller mainly focuses on selling fishing lures.
Sell-Through and Active Listings
You can see how we were able to make inferences based on the data provided to us. Now let’s look at the Active Listings. This is an important indicator of how well the seller is doing.
It is easy to list down thousands of items and make a few hundred sales. However, it is much harder to maximize the sales in each of your active listings. The Sell Through rate will give a percentage based on how many listings are actually performing well.
Anything above 100% Sell Through rate is considered good. In the above example, the seller has an over 350% rate which shows how exceptional he is at optimizing his listings and generating a high number of sales.
Feedback Score
You can also judge the maturity of the seller on the platform based on the Feedback Score. This tells us how many buyers recommended the seller and it gives us a clear idea of how popular the seller is among buyers.
Product Optimization
Now let’s move on to the next stage of the analysis. The stats only help us determine how successful the seller is.
To determine what best practices the seller is imploying we must look at the seller’s listings and check important features like product images, title, shipping policies, product description, etc.
How you optimize your product can greatly affect its sales. Even if you have a killer product, it’s not very useful if your product is not reaching the customers or the product details are vague.
Key Word Dense Titles and Superior Images
You can look at the top products of the seller and check out how they are optimizing their listings. For example, when it comes to the title, you must have a decent number of keywords while also making sure the title is informative and concise.
This also helps the search engine identify your product so you are able to rank high in a particular search page or category.
As for the images, make sure you are using high-quality images that show the product clearly. It is much better to take your own images instead of picking one off Google.
Relevancy of Products
The upload dates of the listings can also give you a clear idea of the relevance of the products. For example, if the product was uploaded last year or two years ago, but the 30-day sales are still decent, it shows that the seller is doing pretty well and the item is very relevant.
You are more likely to gain success if you focus on items like this which are better in the long-term and continue to generate sales even after an old upload date.
Visit the eBay Listing
The next stage of your research is going to the item’s original eBay page and figuring see how the item is optimized. Here you can see the number of images the seller used and the quality of these images as well.
Item Variations
You can also check to see if the item has different variations (e.g. different sizes, colors, etc.).
Variations are a great way to jot together similar products and make it more convenient for the buyer to locate these items. This will increase the reputation of your store in the buyer’s eyes and make them want to come back anytime they want to buy something.
Shipping and Return Policies
You can scroll down to find the shipping policies for your chosen product on the eBay page. The shipping policy can give you an idea of how you should ship your own product.
For the product above, you can see that the seller is charging more for the shipping than the product itself. This is a great strategy to attract more buyers with the low price and then make up for the defect with the shipping price.
However, you need to be careful as this strategy can be a double-edged sword and make the buyers think that you may be scamming them. So make sure you put up a reasonable shipping price.
Coming Up With Strategies
Many beginner sellers also use free shipping to attract buyers. You can do this as well but make sure you are not facing any losses due to the strategy.
You can also put up a 30-day return policy if your supplier is offering replacements. In many cases, this comes with very low additional charges so you are still making decent profits in the long run. Make sure you weigh all of these options and then choose what works best for you.
Final Thoughts
Researching your competition is a crucial step in starting out your online eBay store. It is a great way to determine the best practices for increasing your sales while minimizing any losses. Using a powerful tool is imperative in your competitor research journey and can be the deciding factor when it comes to dominating a market.
We hope these tips and strategies helped you figure out the best way to optimize your listings. Best of luck in your eBay selling journey.
