Aug
27
Idea HotSpots
Filed Under Sellers' Insights
Ideas for Choosing Product Lines
By Chris Malta, Author of the Dropship Source Directory
What NOT to Sell
Everyone who starts an eBiz faces the question: What do I sell? And most everyone seems to make two classic mistakes in the beginning:
1. They try to sell what everyone else is selling: DVDs, electronics, designer clothing. The problem they encounter is that the market is already saturated with these products and the Suppliers typically do not work in small quantity. To make any profit at all, they’d have to buy huge quantities.
2. They try to sell what they know and love. Unfortunately, unless there is a significant demand for what they know and love, they are going to be stuck with a lot of product they can appreciate but can’t move.
What’s an IDEA HOTSPOT?
Lisa Suttora of WhatDoISell.com coined the term “idea hotspot” to refer to anything, any place or person that “provide[s] you with an unending source of new product ideas, of market trends, of developing niches, and product line education. It is a fertile ground for product ideas.” These hotspots keep you in touch with what people are buying, what things are up-and-coming, and what things are on their way out.
If your ideas all come from one or two places, you are limiting yourself. Expand your thinking - you might consider looking at one of these “hotspots” for inspiration:
- Newspapers. You can get an idea of what is on the minds of consumers by simply reading the lifestyle section, the business section, or looking at the advertisements the big stores are putting out.
- Consumer Publications. There are hundreds of magazines designed around niche products, niche hobbies, and niche markets. They are a terrific resource for building niche product lines.
- Malls/brick-and-mortar stores. Talk to the salespeople, find out what is selling. You can even source your Suppliers off the boxes. Get the manufacturer’s name, call them up, and ask who their local distributor is in your area.
- Trend-spotting websites, such as http://www.trendwatching.com/, http://www.influxinsights.com/, and http://www.trendhunter.com/ .
- The entertainment industry - movies and TV drive product trends. If you know what is coming out in the movie industry, you can start sourcing related products before the trend begins. Imdb.com maintains a list of movies that are going to be released in the coming year. So if you know now that a particular movie is going to be coming out, you can start stocking up on relevant products before they become pricey such as Batman, Superman, Curious George, and Star Wars.
Write It Down
Suttora strongly suggests carrying a product sourcing notebook, be it a PDA or hand-held notebook, to keep track of your ideas as they come. She warns, “90% of ideas that you don’t write down will get lost. When you’re at these idea hotspots, if you see a hundred ideas for products to sell, you won’t be able to remember those. You’ve got to write them down in your product sourcing notebook and then go back and start researching them.”
All good suggestions. I might add that something else to keep in mind are things such as the time of year - holidays, and so forth. As for using newspapers, the lifestyle sections are okay, but more importantly in some cases are the headlines themselves. Someone or thing that is ‘hot’ in the news can elevate sales related to that person or thing. Brick-and-mortar stores tend to be too localized - in other words, they may show a LOCAL trend, but that may have no real application in the eBay world. As for hobbies, most popular hobby items will sell to those interested in each particular hobby. Items such as model trains, RC planes, and things of that nature are usually good sellers. Especially during the season, just about anything NASCAR will go.
A lot is just common sense, and doesn’t require endless hours of research. One of the best sources you can utilize is simply looking at the completed sales on eBay - see what’s been selling and how WELL it has been selling. IF you have some particular items that are not doing well at the moment, it won’t hurt to hold on to them for a while. People who buy on eBay tend to be fickle at times. What might be dead in the water right now might be hot as lava a month or even a week from now, and what’s going like crazy at the moment may fall flat as soon as tomorrow.
It seems that eBay continues to make it difficult for folks to make profit, with their ever-increasing prices for sellers. I don’t know where the mentality comes from that say the way to make more profit is by increasing the costs - this doesn’t work in any real-world scenario (other than perhaps the oil industry). They seem to forget that what made them as big as they are was the sheer VOLUME of all the little sales that added up to lots of $$$. It’s like thing like taxes - no country in the history of the world has ever taxed itself into prosperity. Lower taxes, and increase the tax base. It doesn’t require a degree in economics to figure that out.
With that in mind, you need to be a bit more aggressive with your sales, and try to promote and display them in the best way possible. One site to keep in mind is Auctiva, where you can use templates, multiple and supersized pictures and so forth for FREE. It costs 15 cents a picture after the first picture at eBay, 75 cents to supersize, 10 cents for scheduling, for using templates, and so on - all things which you can have at no cost by running your listings through Auctiva.
Using the ‘trend’ sites can be insightful to a point, but most of these trends tend to get out-dated rather quickly. Again, the best was to judge a trend on eBay is to simply look at the completed listings - that will show you the most recent trends, and give you a better idea of what’s hot and what’s not.