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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 Amazon or Walmart. 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
There’s no doubt the level of competition in dropshipping is high and getting higher every year. What gives you the edge over them is your product/s and the quality of the market research you have undertaken to choose them.
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 example.
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.
Ready to conduct some badass market research? Great, let’s get stuck in!
Market Research With ZIK Analytics in 4 Easy Steps
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. When 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.
You can think of a niche as being 2-3 keywords that define a product or category, for example, yoga mat. You can then drill deeper and find the product you want to sell, for example, travel yoga mats, blue yoga mats, yoga mats for dogs… you get the idea!
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 already 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 Amazon.com 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 eBay 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.
Now we want to shortlist some items.
To find a suitable dropship product, it’s important to satisfy certain criteria. Your hot item should…
- 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)
Keep your shortlist of items handy!
Step: 2 Analyse your niche for profitability
Before drilling down to the exact product you’re going to sell, you’re going to have to do some research to find out if this is, in fact, a profitable niche.
Top tip: Install the 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…
You will see 3 tabs at the top: Product Research, Title Analytics, and Price Analysis. We’re going to focus on Product Research.
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.
You can see it has 88% successful listings… another good indicator.
Now check the average price. It’s not just about demand, can you afford to be competitive on price?
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.
We’re ready to drill down from a 2-3 keyword niche to a specific product people are searching for and want to buy.
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.
Why?
Because normally buyers buy from sellers with lots of great feedback, if someone is selling a decent number of items with a low feedback score… then they must be doing something very right. More often than not, they’ve found a hot product.
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.
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.
Why?
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.
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.
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!
Quick Links:
Conclusion : [Updated] How To Do Market Research For eBay Dropshipping 2022
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.
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