Tips For Easy Online Consumer Market Research
Written by admin on April 4th, 2011When performing online consumer market research, you will be researching these three things: your customer, the products and your competition. Consider this: would you open a coffee shop in a shopping center without knowing if there are other coffee shops nearby? Without researching how many people shop in the center each day? I doubt it! Without performing sufficient online consumer market research, online sellers can find themselves with a garage full of thousands of dollars worth of inventory and no interested customers to buy it. Avoid getting yourself into a bad situation by following these tips for easy online consumer market research.
The first step of online consumer market research will help you narrow down your items to target specific customers. Come up with a few product ideas. You may already have a few in mind. Remember, the best items to sell are niche items that appeal to only a small audience. This might seem odd, but new sellers become PowerSellers by appealing to a very small number of customers then expand their product range later. For example, plus size men’s sleepwear, fishing rod holders, left handed can-openers or women’s golf shoes are types of small audience niche items that will appeal to a small number of customers.
The second step is to research each of these products individually. Do this by searching through eBay’s completed listings. This may take couple of hours of your time but will not cost a thing. Go to eBay.com and click the “advanced search” icon next to the search bar. Find the heading “search including” and check the box for “completed listings”. This second step of online consumer market research will help you find products that consumers are actually buying, not just what sellers are listing. Enter keywords describing the item you are thinking about selling, select a category and click the search button.
Now on to step three. The resulting list of search results that are returned on your screen are the key to online consumer market research. Read through them and see at which and how many items actually sold (the price will be green) and how many did not sell (the price will be red). Compare the number of sold listings to the number of unsold listings. In able to find a profitable niche product, you will need to find a product with a minimum of 60% of its completed listings being sold. Review at least 5 pages to truly make sure you have a profitable product.
The last step in online consumer market research is probably the easiest! After you have determined that your item meets the 60% threshold, it is time to find a supplier!If your item is below the 60% mark, choose a new product idea and start over. It may take you a little time to find the right product, but the time you invest will definitely pay off in the long run.
Tags: absolute fund, appeal, audience, bad situation, button, can openers, category, Center, coffee, coffee shop, coffee shops, com, consumer, consumer market research, customer, easy, ebay, fishing rod holders, golf shoes, heading, interested customers, Key, mark, market, niche, number, online, price, product ideas, research, review, rod, screen, Search, search bar, search button, search icon, Shop, shopping center, size, size men, sleepwear, supplier, thousands of dollars, time, Tips, Worth
