[Updated] How To Do Market Research For eBay Dropshipping 2019

eBay Dropshipping is as popular as ever. And it's easy to see why... work when and wherever you want, start and grow a business with barely any investment and sell products on a famous platform with a ready-made audience of 167 million hungry buyers...

Loads of people are trying to get in on the action. But how do you start? Let's start by talking about what dropshipping is.

What is eBay dropshipping?

In a simplified sense, eBay dropshipping is selling a product through your eBay store that you buy from a supplier who ships it directly to the customer. You don't ever hold any stock and are in effect, just a middle man.

When dropshipping on eBay, you can choose from a variety of suppliers. Many people use wholesale suppliers, but another option is to use a retail supplier, such as or . This model is commonly known as retail arbitrage .

In summary, to dropship on eBay there are 3 essential steps:

List your items and fulfill your orders

Of course, things aren't so simple. So in this guide, we're going to concentrate on the first step

The best choice for a product to Dropship is one that is niche, profitable and has people waiting to buy it.

If you choose to invest time and resources into market research and finding the very best products, you're already ahead of most of your competition.

Everyone's looking for the goose that lays the golden egg. There are many ways to find hot products but none quicker and easier than using special software. ZIK Analytics is one such exampl e.

ZIK is a market research software tool that helps sellers find profitable in-demand items, categories, and niches for you to sell on eBay and grow your store.

Market Research With ZIK Analytics in 4 Easy Steps

Ready to conduct some badass market research? Great, let's get stuck in!

Step 1: Get some ideas for your niche.

Before we find our hot products we have to decide on a niche.

A niche is a category the product fits in. W hen you find item categories with high demand from customers but a low supply of sellers, you end up with a great opportunity to make some cash.

A method I recommend for getting great niche ideas is by following your would-be competitors.

Sometimes if you want to be successful, it's a good idea to copy someone who is successful. Why do you think so many people read the autobiographies of successful people?

To find a potential competitor, we can use Amazon.

Go to and select any category from the dropdown. Type in " bestseller" and hit enter. Then, choose a top-selling item from the Amazon results, copy the item into and write down the name of a seller that has sold a lot of them.

Once you've found a seller, start scrolling through all the items they're selling and see if there's anything that takes your fancy.

Now jump over to ZIK Analytics and search for the seller on the . competitor research tool

Enter the seller's name in the search bar. We want to see a good spread of data so we will select last 30 days. Now hit Enter.

You'll be presented with a screen like this:

What you'll see is an array of statistics which indicate how well they are doing and what products are making them money.

In the above example you can see how many active listings they have, which ones have successfully sold, how much money they've earned, the average selling price etc.

Now scroll down to see the products they sell.

To find a suitable dropship product, it's important to satisfy certain criteria. Your hot item should...

Keep your shortlist of items handy!

Step: 2 Analyse your niche for profitability

• Be unbranded.
• Be easy to substitute with an alternative product in future.
• Sell for more than $5 (the higher the price, the bigger the profit margin)

Install the Top tip:ZIK Booster extension for Chrome and Firefox before continuing!

So starting from ZIK's homepage open the product research page, it looks like this...

Put the keywords that define the niche into the search bar , check the filters (where you want to ship it to etc) and hit search.

ZIK then pulls the top results from eBay, like so...

Check all items and select ZIK Selection

ZIK is now going to pull the data from eBay regarding these listings and the transactions. Wait a few seconds and then you get this screen...

Check the sell-through rate. In dropshipping, the sell-through rate (STR) is the units sold divided by the number of listings you have. For example, if your store has 50 listings and they get 20 sales, your sell- through rate is 20/50 x 100= 40%

With this example, the average sell-through rate for these products is 2924%! This means for every 100 listings, 2924 items are sold. There are 29 buyers for each seller. This is a GREAT sign.

Check the competition. There's a pie at the bottom left of the screen where you can check how diverse the market is and each seller's market share. You don't want to fight with a monopoly so the more spread out - the better.

The graph below shows you how stable the market is. This one looks pretty good.

All in all, this market is ideal for us to pursue and investigate further. Demand is high, there's a high success rate and the market is diverse.

Step 3: Choose a product to sell

Now we are going to put our detective hats on and probe further.

Still, on the same page, scroll down and let's analyze the listings themselves. We're looking for a good selling opportunity.

Here we can see the seller's feedback, number of sales, picture, title and price of the listing and where the seller is located.

What we will look at first is sellers with low feedback.

So order the results by feedback, lowest to highest.

Just on this small sample, you can see one seller with only 300 feedback that has sold 81 items in the last 30 days for nearly $3 more than the market average.

We're ready to drill down from a 2-3 keyword niche to a specific product people are searching for and want to buy.

This should be very interesting to you. Snoop around and try to work out why it's selling so well... Is it the price, title, description, the uniqueness of the item or speed of shipping?

Another thing to look for is high sellers with higher-than-average prices.

If someone can get a similar product cheaper elsewhere, why are they choosing these products and sellers?

Of course, it could be feedback but not always. Dig deeper, go through the listing and make notes.

Why?

Maybe you can sell this product?

A good example from our sample is this one...

The product is $7 more than the average for the market, the seller has less than 1000 feedback and the item is pretty unique. Interesting...

Click on the listings you like and look at the eBay listings themselves. Read through the product description, check out the shipping policy and look at the photos. Your job is to find out what this seller is doing right.

Step 4: Check out your suppliers

You've found a profitable niche, you've got a few ideas for products. Now it's time to check our suppliers and see if we can find a hot item to dropship.

We can use Amazon for this. Cut and paste one of the product descriptions from your list. It's a good idea to delete a couple of terms to expand the search a little.

Here I've found an item similar to one of the ones I found earlier.

Why?

You can see the price is under the average price sold on eBay for this niche. So this would be a great option to sell.

So with your smarts and a little help from ZIK Analytics you should have one or two hot products to source and sell. And with this kind of market research, you can think of yourself as already ahead of the crowd.

Your next step would be to find a supplier that fits your needs to supply the product, then you're well and truly on your way to eBay dropshipping success.

Good luck out there!

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Conclusion : [Updated] How To Do Market Research For eBay Dropshipping 2019

If you are using ZIK for your eBay dropshipping business, I can confidently say that you will not be disappointed. Let me know in the comments section below what you liked the most about ZIK Analytics and be sure to share it on your social media accounts.