Auction Informer

EBay is a great opportunity to make money in your underwear, if that is what you want to do.

But no matter what you wear while running your home-based online auction business, competitive research is extremely important.

Let me translate this term into common English. Competitive research means that you spy on your competitors.

That doesn’t sound nice? Well, it’s a reality of business life.

I do not want to say that it’s a dog eat dog world where only the strongest survive. But to be successful and to make a lot of money you need to be grounded firmly in reality.

Now, let me clarify that when I say spy on your competition, I don’t mean that you should wire tap their phone or hire a private detective or install a Trojan horse on their computer or anything illegal like that. That would just bring you into trouble. And besides, it’s not good for your business. In the long run fair play does pay off better.

So what do I mean when I say spy? I mean did you gather all the data that you legally can gather about your competitor, look at his business in as much detail as possible, emulate what’s working and improve upon that?

That’s really the way business goes. Emulate and improve. And I don’t mean rip off. Be ethical in what you’re doing. But what you want to do is really create a better mousetrap. And the way to do that is to look at all the mouse traps that are out there now, see what’s working, and find ways to make it work better.

So how do you spy on your eBay competition?

One very simple, but surprisingly accurate method of spying on your eBay competition is to find the most successful sellers in your market and look at their feedback profile.

And I don’t mean that you should look at how positive or negative their feedback is. But look at what they actually sold on what date and for how much. EBay shows you all this data. You can actually see what item they sold on what date. And you can see what title they used. And you can see what exactly they wrote in the description. And you can see what kinds of pictures to used. And you can see which extra options, like featured listing, bold listing, highlighted listing, etc. they used. And you can see at what time and day they ended their auctions.

Do you understand how powerful this really is? This is almost like being able to x-ray your competitors business and diagnose exactly where their weaknesses and where their strengths are.

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