For most of us, EBay is a fun way to buy almost anything. We all enjoy browsing the categories and imagining that laptop on our desk or that appliance in our Kitchen. Selling on eBay is a neeto hobbies that brings in a little extra cash. For a few, it’s a full time job, marketing, selling, and shipping product.
If you want your own home-based eBay business, your best product sources are drropshippers and light wholesalers. Light wholesalers are companies that will move product in small quantities that smaller business owners without vast amounts of storage space or start-up capital can handle. Drop shippers are light wholesalers who will ship product one at a time direct to your customer, as if it comes from you. These options allow entrepreneurs to choose products, and focus on marketing them, without concerns about large storage, high start-up costs, employees and wages.
Market research wizard by Worldwide Brands is a tool that helps you decide what products to sell online. It uses data gathered from eBay, yahoo, Google, and other sources to provide a breakdown of costs, demand, supply and competition, then calculates your chances of success. It can be used to determine where to sell, and how to market your products. WWB also publishes directories of drop ship and light wholesale suppliers, and provides reliable and thoughtful information and analysis.
I decided to do a case study of this powerful program, but first, I needed a product. I bought the drop ship directory, and spent a few hours browsing. Naturally, the first thing I looked for was the electronics thinking… computer club. Anyway, it didn’t take me long to see some drawbacks. One of the wwb newsletters voiced exactly what I was thinking, and clinched it for me. The demand for electronics is stable, but the market is saturated. Everyone has to undercut everybody else to get the sale, and so if you do sell, the profit margin is generally low. Then I hit on something totally unexpected… Cake. That’s right, Gourmet frozen cheesecake. I’d buy it if I had the money, You bet your life. Plus, I cheated and studied the bottom line for a couple of days, and MRW reported excellent chances of success.
Our supplier is Sussie’s Of Mississippi. They make cookies, cake, and barbecue sauces, among other things. When you open the market research wizard, you are at the welcome screen, which introduces the program. To move between the functions of the program, click the tabs at the bottom of the screen, or click view, and choose the appropriate window from there. The keyword fields, sorting buttons, and tree view showing your searches, remain the same in all windows, so you can change keywords or view results for a particular component from anywhere.
Sussie’s Cheesecakes weigh 18 OZ. and they retile for $40 US. This includes free next day shipping to the US and Canada. There are four flavours to choose from. Visit their website at http://www.sussies.com.
Demand checks popular search engines and finds out what people are searching for. As I write this, no one is searching for cheese cake. Last week, some 250 people actually were searching on chese cake. For the search I’m currently working with, I ?changed my category to food. That netted me results I have no use for, for example, deer food. Using cake as my category last week netted me much more likely possibilities, such as wedding cake and cake recipes. Beside each search is the number of searches on those keywords within 15 to 30 days. The main point of interest in this page is the variations on your keywords. An ideal situation is to have a high number of searches along with a low number of variations, because this means that more people are likely to want the product, and be able to find you. Cheesecake has a consistently low number of variations, but it also has comparatively few searches. One search on Cheesecake turned up 652 searches with 7 variations, while a similar search using a different category in the keywords turned up 0 searches and 0 variations. This is probably because the second category keyword I used was more general than the first, and thus had a negative effect on my search results.
By comparison, here are results for Cheesecake alone:
A glance at the category keyword “cake” shows just what you would expect. The more general keyword holds far and away the bulk of the overall totals. If we made cheesecake our category and started using the four flavours we have access to as product keywords, that surely would yield interesting results on other pages, but not here where competition for Cheesecake is so slim.
This page shows where and how many ads there are for your product on the net. The interesting feature of this page is a list of people who are actively advertising your keywords. Double clicking each one opens the homepage of the website advertising your product. Naturally, some of the entries say things like “Cheesecakes: compare Prices” http://www.bizrate.com, or “Low prices on cheesecakes” http://www.nextag.com. I think results like those are pretty useless myself. You would still have to waid through headers and popups and banner ads, and if you did find what you were looking for, either the product would be inferior, or the low price would never materialize. Those places rely heavily on glitz and hype to draw people in. Besides, I wouldn’t shop there myself, especially for something as specific as cheesecake.
You also get excellent results, such as “Cakes at delightful deliveries”. This is a specialty shop that sells cakes, cookies, guift baskets and more. Browsing a site like this gives you a real sense of what the competition is actually doing. How much are people charging? How much selection are they offering? What extra services are they offering? Free shipping ETC.
Often I find myself thinking, “Wouldn’t it be great if they added this feature?”, only to discover that it's already available.. The resources page is just such a case in point. Market research wizard comes with two companion products: The Drop ship Source Directory, and The Light Wholesale directory. For our case study, we began knowing what product we wanted, and where to get it, but we didn’t have to do it this way. We could have started with a brand name Maxtor, a product 200 gb hard drive, and a category computers for example. Then, we would have learned some nifty things about selling Maxtor hard drives, but if we wanted to buy in, where would we start?
If you’ve purchased the drop ship or light wholesale directories, You can add them to the resources tab, and search them via the market research wizard. The only slight drawback is that they haven’t made the search results clickable yet, so you still have to log into the directory via the web to see the contact information for each supplier.
There are two other clickable tabs in this window. The supply methods tab details drop shipping and light wholesaling and how they work. You need this information if you want to be successful selling on eBay or through your own online store front.
The business resources tab links to WWB’s business centre. No one should be without this information, but the interface of the resources tab is not the nicest way in the world to get it. You would be better off spending some time on the actual worldwide brands website in their resource center, and especially, subscribing to their news letter and listening to the radio cybercast.
This is a tool much like the competition listing, but where-as the competition page leans more toward people who want their own online store front, the auction Pricing page is better suited to people who want to sell through eBay. It simply shows current auctions that matched your key terms and the value of each auction.
Auction pricing can be difficult. Lower prices attract more bidders, but an auction that gets undersold loses money. You can always over charge for shipping, but no one likes to feel they have been had after the sale. If you check here, and find things are being undersold, you may want to consider moving your product to an online store, or, making some careful decisions about the format, pricing and advertising of your auctions.
I would also like to see the ability to click and be taken directly to auctions of interest implemented here. Then I would know how many bidders there are, whether there's a reserve, whether the seller is using pictures or other auction tools and how effective the formatting is.
One thing I found was that I didn’t get very accurate results on a product like cheesecake. I got cake pans, recipe books, candles, blank cd’s cake boxed, and an Aerosmith live album on cassette from 1979.
This is easily the niftiest page on the wizard. It will display all of the searches in your database, along with all of their statistics. You can click the column headers to sort by a given statistic. This makes it ridiculously easy to study online trends, compare demand vs. variation, and discover which keywords yield the best chances of success.
Don’t forget, you can also export all your data to a CSV file, and import it into excel or equivalent spreadsheet program. From there, you can generate nifty pie charts and graphs for addition to your business and marketing plans.
Finally… The bottom line. How well is cheese cake going to do in the online market? Between 50 and 83% in four searches over 4 weeks. My category keywords need a lot of work. The only one that went anywhere was one search where I used cheesecake as a category, then flavour keywords such as chocolate and blueberry.
Results like these are very motivating and confidence building. Results for my search on Maxtor hard drives were a great relief, as in, “boy, I’m glad I didn’t find that out the hard way.”
Of course, a basic understanding of business sales and marketing is an asset with this tool. If you don’t have great business sense, there are masses of wonderful material available on the WWB site.
What’s not to like? I find the interface very cluttered and keyboard unfriendly. Make sure you install it on a stable computer, as it’s not very portable at all. I would rather have a proper .chm help system, but the documentation itself was excellent. So, the only real problems I ran into were of a design nature. The capabilities of mrw are everything WWB promises and more.
The market research wizard costs $97 US. Its companion directories cost $69.95 each, or you can buy them in a package along with a $25 e-book for $197. This sounds like a lot of outlay, until you start pricing store fronts, warehousing, employee wages and benefits, taxes, and all the wonderful business of setting up your own store front. Make no mistake, these products will not make you a millionaire over night, think for you or teach you problem-solving, or win you friends and influence. They will provide the information you need to be successful if you invest the time, money, and practicality to pull it all together.