One topic that online sellers don’t like to talk about is how they get their stock. That’s understandable because it’s wise to keep you best tips secret.
But sellers will often talk about how they want to sell more and ask the question about how they can improve sell through rates and conversions.
Both of these essential processes for sellers can be addressed with a little help from the Research and Analytics section of the Tamebay Guide sponsored by XSellco.
You might be surprised by the range and selection of analytics tools that exist for online sellers on marketplaces and on your websites. And it is often quite surprising to learn how few sellers utilise such tools to crunch the numbers and form a deep understanding of how their business works.
Put simply, there isn’t a question that can’t be answered with the right tool so there isn’t any real need to “fly blind”. You can delve deep into the marketplaces and understand how competitors are doing and how you might be able to outsmart them. There are marketplaces tools available for both eBay and Amazon.
You can also look at individual product lines and see how they’re performing over time. Check out the marketplace averages on conversion and also prices too. What’s selling well? What’s going out of vogue? Where are the steady sellers? How much competition is there?
A lot of the product specific information you can find will prove absolutely vital when you’re sourcing your stock. By having a realistic feel for the goods that are selling well today, you can make better judgements about what to pay and how much you order. There’s nothing worse than taking a big punt on stock that’s already experiencing diminishing demand.
And by combining general marketplace intelligence with your own sales data you can build up a genuinely useful plan on what you need to buy and what you need to sell. There’s not much point holding onto stock for the sake of it. It makes makes much more sense to sell it as close to cost as possible so you can free up cash to invest in future best sellers.
It may seem tricky, you may also baulk at the expense, but if you aren’t already using an analytics suite to get the marketplace knowledge you need, you’re actually putting you entire business at risk.
