Selling online begun with the idea of selling used items and antiques online. Today, an overwhelming volume of products of various types are traded over the internet. The question is: How do you start selling products online? What products should you sell? Where can you source your products from? 

What products should you sell?

There are two ways you can approach this - sell products with high demand and high competition (commodity products), or sell unique products with lesser demand but higher margins.

Selling products with high demand and stiff competition means that you need to be able to source products at the lowest prices. In order to break into the market, you may sometimes need to sell your product at cost, or even below cost. If you can pull this off however, you have the potential to sell a high volume of a fast moving product.

Unique products such as collectibles or antiques are usually more expensive and do not get sold as quickly. However, the higher profits also mean that you get better value out of your time spent to market your product. You would still need to determine if there is significant demand for your product though. Products with too few potential buyers would not be worth your efforts.  

How to find products with high demand? 

Assume that you want to sell a product through a marketplace such as eBay.com. Before you know what you want to sell, you’ll need to run your research on the products already on sale on eBay. What are the fast moving products? What are their average sale prices? Are they seasonal? Who are some of the best eBay sellers for that category?

Look through the eBay product categories, and pay attention to products where the auctions have already ended. To do this, just click on Completed Listings on the Search Options Panel. Ask yourself these questions: 

• How many products within a category have been sold?
• What are the average prices of this product?
• How many bids are there for each item?
• How many other sellers are there for this item?

 Use eBay Research Tools

With tools such as Marketplace Research by eBay or Terapeak, you are able to analyze all types of sales information. Research is particularly useful if you are selling a well-known product (such as iPods or other branded electronic items). With research, you’ll gain insights on the average price of each product, reserve price, closed price, the number of bidders, and the number of bids on an item. In fact, with simple calculation methods, you are able to determine the market price, market size and sell through rates. 

On the flip side, research tools may be less useful if you are not selling a commodity-type of product. Each product is unique with its own perceived value that may vary greatly between products. In this case, you would gain more insight from analyzing individual product listing of completed items. 

Product sources

If you are selling a commodity product, your ability to source for the lowest prices is one of the most important factors for success. Electronic and electrical items are amongst the products with highly price-sensitive buyers, fast turn-around, and stiff competition. 

This means you need to spend time looking for the best product sources. Websites such as www.globalsources.com, www.alibaba.com and www.made-in-china.com aim to match buyer and seller for bulk purchase items. The challenge here is to establish the right contacts and connections that will offer you the lowest price possible. Other potential sources could be overstocked products from manufacturers or manufacturer reps.

As most manufacturers require minimum order quantities, it may be a better idea to work with wholesalers instead. Of course, this also depends on your relationship with your wholesaler, which will affect your product costs. 

Another popular option is to use the service of drop-shippers. With their services, you won’t need to worry about keeping inventory and shipping your products. Drop-shippers will process your orders and get your products sent to your customers. The down side to this however is that paying for their services may leave you with hardly any profits at all, especially when you are selling commodity products. 

Popular drop-ship and wholesale portals include www.worldwidebrands.com and www.salehoo.com.

Selling online and picking the right keywords

Keyword optimization is one of the main keys in reaching your customers. After all, the first thing that buyers would do is to run a search for the product they are looking for. 

Therefore, finding out what keywords your customers are using to find your product is essential. To do this, read my previous post on finding niche keywords , to learn how to determine what your customers are looking for.

If you are selling your product on eBay, the Top Searches allows you to determine the keywords used by buyers to search for products within a particular category. By entering the keyword of a particular product or brand, a list of other unique keywords used by these buyers is also shown. 

eBay description tactics 

As you observe product listings on eBay, you’ll soon notice that there is a specific approach to the copywriting used for product descriptions and sales copies. It’s like everyone writes in a certain proven way. 

The fact is, these internet marketers are writing both to trigger the appropriate search results, as well as to appeal to the readers. There have also been cases where sellers relate a story or a history to the product that they are selling. For example, there was a case on eBay where a lady wrote in great lengths of her shopping experience with her kids in tow had resulted in her purchasing a product that she didn’t really want, and thus attempting to dispose of it on eBay!

Here are some great guides I’ve found online that would be a great help to you in writing your product descriptions: 

How to write a good eBay description  

EBay descriptions that sell 

How to write better eBay descriptions 

Simple rules to a great eBay listing 

Writing the perfect description for your eBay listing 

Auction closing times

An experienced eBay seller will probably tell you that peak eBay traffic falls on Sunday evening. Daily peak times fall between 8:00 pm and 10:00 pm Pacific time. With this, it is important that the closing time of your auctions falls on these times for maximum impact.

Here are some online resources on listing timing: 

Maximize Bids by Timing Your Listings 

Best Time to end an eBay Auction?