What Sells on EBay : You Can Use the Auction House's Own Data to Find Out What Sells on EBay

From the early days of the internet, eBay has been at the forefront of consumer-to-consumer transactions, but making good use of the online auction system remains rife with frustrations. Listing items can be a time-consuming enterprise, and there seems to me some mystery about what sells on eBay and what doesn't. I can vividly remember spending hours on end scanning in and listing a handful high-end baseball cards way back in 1999 and receiving virtually no interest for my efforts. Then, on a whim, I decided to list an unloved artificial Christmas tree that my wife and I were throwing out, and it set off a bidding war that landed in the $200 range. Figuring out what eBay buyers want, then, can be a crap shoot, but the the website itself actually provides some clues to help you out.

Of course, one time-honored tradition on eBay is searching for "comps" to see if anything similar to your item has sold recently and whether it's worth your time to list. But a more direct method of querying eBay buyers is to use the "want it now" listings, which represent real users looking for real items. If you compare the number of want ads for a particular item to the number of items available in the broader eBay market, you can get a good idea of which products are likely to garner a decent amount of attention.

Of course, doing this legwork on your own can be tedious, too, though it can save you on the backend if it prevents you from creating listings for items that won't sell on eBay. There are also software tools available that can quickly perform these steps for you and help you pinpoint what sells on eBay. Either way, your auction listings don't have to be a shot in the dark if you're willing to spend a little time up front.