So How To Find Top Selling Products To Sell?

Jason,

Thanks for the idea.

Would you mind Expanding on How you'd use this Gained Knowledge of Huge Demand? Or are you thinking along the lines of what MW suggested - a website based around just one product, with a Competitive Advantage of bonus items, bigger purchase options options, faster delivery, etc.

Your mention of Outsourcing reminds me of something Dick Smith said - which I mentioned a few weeks ago... find the best from around the world and copy them.

Harv T Eker also said, find what's working over there and bring it over here. It will get here anyway, due to creep, but by brining it over you beat the Lag Time.

But the trick is, Finding what is Selling.

Books are tied up with publishers. Although, Bulk Lots can be purchased from the Licensed Distributors. Such as one of the Large distributors down in Oz has one simple request... at least $200 worth of books must be bought (that's $200 worth at wholesale prices). But you will be competing with all other book sellers that people already feel comfortable doing business with.

Re Copying... After searching ebay, clicking Related Items and following that kind of see/click/see/click line, I stumbled upon something interesting...

Two Power Sellers in Australia selling the Same product. Only two of them. One sells with Buy It Now, the other sells via Auction. Without naming them outright and using like-wise names, one is called Vidshanty and the other is Discshanty.

The interesting thing is, the Auctions almost always reach the same Buy It Now price and go no higher (sometimes being only a few cents under). Which tells me, those who Bid also know of the Buy It Now seller. Both sellers, of this one particular item (and they both sell a range of items), make a sale during the Listing Life. Though I feel the Auction guy is limiting himself by only selling one at a time.

Further research reveals one of them is an Actual Store. They do shop front sales as well as a Large Mailorder Operation in addition to their Ebay side. And they keep their ebay side Separate from their store/mailorder side - you cannot call them and get the cheaper ebay prices, for example.

I don't know much about the other seller, yet.

What I found most interesting was the Product Sold and how one seller had obviously copied the Name of the other seller. The second half of the name was such a quirky word its use had to be deliberate.

I've been watching these two sellers for the past week and a half. The Buy It Now Seller sold 4 units at his last listing while the Auction Seller sold 1 unit. The Buy It Now Seller offers Lower Shipping as his edge.

The Auction Seller also offers a Two Unit deal. Again, the price of his Auctions stops just short - or right on the price - of buying two units from the Buy It Now Seller.

And they both use Auctiva http://www.auctiva.com Free Auction Software.

Michael Ross

Finding "Hot" products is easy for me. The promotional advertising industry puts on several major shows in cities such as Dallas, Orlando, Las Vegas, Chicago, etc. In addition, there are 5 major travelling expos that hit the biggest markets in every region.

I attend 5 to 6 of the travelling shows each year, and let the factory reps put their top products in my hand. Being able to examine the items, checking out the features, and advantages over the competition, is much easier than trying to pick the products from pictures in a catalog.

In July, I'll be flying to Chicago to attend one of those major shows - Over 1000 suppliers will be there, and I'll only have about 8 hours to glean as much info as I can. I've already attended the Southern Showcase, Advantages Roadshow, NSA Showcase, & SAGE Showcase, so I can skip a lot of the suppliers I've already visited with this year.

The suppliers are actually picking up what is hot retail, and then determining which process is the best for adding a company's name, logo, etc. So what is big in retail in 2006, is likely to be "Hot" in my business this year.

Dennis Bevers

Dennis,

Thanks for revealing what is hot in retail last year is good for you this year.

Reminds me of another concept (Joe Karbo?)...

Items that were Hot around 25 years ago will make a comback for many years before dropping off again. Due to people wanting to buy items related to their childhood.

E.g. I recall Bionic Man Dolls. I recently heard of a guy who bought one on ebay for $600 because: he'd always wanted one when he was little but his parents had never bought him one, so now that he was older and able to fund his own purchases, he bought one.

This Technique seem to be more in line with childhood items. But not All childhood items. Do you due before jumpin in.

It would mean, look for things that sold well back around 1982-ish. And stuff that sold well round 1990-ish will be coming into Demand in a few years time. I also recall an old Sowpub post/thread about this cycle.

Michael Ross

[Dien Rice]

Originally Posted by MichaelRoss

Items that were Hot around 25 years ago will make a comback for many years before dropping off again. Due to people wanting to buy items related to their childhood.

E.g. I recall Bionic Man Dolls. I recently heard of a guy who bought one on ebay for $600 because: he'd always wanted one when he was little but his parents had never bought him one, so now that he was older and able to fund his own purchases, he bought one.

This Technique seem to be more in line with childhood items. But not All childhood items. Do you due before jumpin in.

It would mean, look for things that sold well back around 1982-ish. And stuff that sold well round 1990-ish will be coming into Demand in a few years time. I also recall an old Sowpub post/thread about this cycle.

Hi Michael,

I love this topic... Probably because I'm a nostalgic kinda guy...

Anyhow, here are a few earlier threads that deal with this, for those who haven't seen them... Or for those who read them 17 or 25 years ago, and wanted to re-live them!

By the way, I had an Evel Knievel doll (plus motorbike) when I was a kid. Of course, my Evel Knievel doll would jump over my toy cars. Man, that was pretty cool! I had a Six Million Dollar Man doll too... His "bionic eye" was amazing at the time... Though looking back, it was just a lens stuck in his head (the same kind you get through those door peep-holes)... So instead of a peep-hole in a door, it was a peep-hole stuck in a doll's head. I guess if you can put a peep-hole in a doll's head and call it a "bionic eye" - well, that's pretty good marketing!

"You might want to think about this...."
http://www.sowpub.com/forum/showthre...=4440#poststop

"Fads tend to revive every 17 years or so.... What was hot 17 years ago?"
http://www.sowpub.com/forum/showthre...11631#poststop

"Take A Trip Down Memory Lane... Do You Remember These 37 Strange Fads?"
http://www.sowpub.com/forum/showthre...15047#poststop

Cheers, Dien

Cicadas were hot around here 17 years ago, and they should be back any day now...

Originally Posted by Dien Rice

Hi Michael,

I love this topic... Probably because I'm a nostalgic kinda guy...

Anyhow, here are a few earlier threads that deal with this, for those who haven't seen them... Or for those who read them 17 or 25 years ago, and wanted to re-live them!

By the way, I had an Evel Knievel doll (plus motorbike) when I was a kid. Of course, my Evel Knievel doll would jump over my toy cars. Man, that was pretty cool! I had a Six Million Dollar Man doll too... His "bionic eye" was amazing at the time... Though looking back, it was just a lens stuck in his head (the same kind you get through those door peep-holes)... So instead of a peep-hole in a door, it was a peep-hole stuck in a doll's head. I guess if you can put a peep-hole in a doll's head and call it a "bionic eye" - well, that's pretty good marketing!

"You might want to think about this...."
http://www.sowpub.com/forum/showthre...=4440#poststop

"Fads tend to revive every 17 years or so.... What was hot 17 years ago?"
http://www.sowpub.com/forum/showthre...11631#poststop

"Take A Trip Down Memory Lane... Do You Remember These 37 Strange Fads?"
http://www.sowpub.com/forum/showthre...15047#poststop

Cheers, Dien

Michael Ross touched upon using MLM's to "find" top-selling products. I second Michael's terrific point-- that is a great place to cultivate products to sell.

MLM oriented products offer some terrific advantages:
1. The usually have some sort of exclusivity about them-- so a person can not usually find them in a retail store.
2. They usually have a "fat" profit margin, which means if you "knocked them off" you would be able to under-cut the MLM and still provide a terrific profit margin for yourself.
3. MLM's put a lot of time into creating sales literature for their products, which gives you a head start in creating sales literature for your own product based on the MLM's product.
4. A top-selling MLM product usually has some recognition within the market so you can use that to help sell your "knock-off" product.

Here is a brief plan on how to use MLM's to start your own business and help you create your own products:
1. Research MLM's with product lines that interest you.
2. Find out what their top selling product is.
3. Join the MLM.
4. Build a website specifically around that product.
5. Gain some sales and experience selling that product-- forget about recruiting. Focus on starting your businesses, fine tuning your infrastructure and building a customer list.
6. Research how to "knock-off" the MLM's top-selling product.
7. Start selling your own product.

Hi Michael,

Here's a real secret tactic that I have used, quietly on ebay that may help you in Analyzing the 2 players in the auction market. I just wanted to comment also on 2 statement that you made

"Though I feel the Auction guy is limiting himself by only selling one at a time."

The "Auction Guy" may just be selling more items per auction than the Buy it now guy but "invisibily. More later.

"I've been watching these two sellers for the past week and a half. The Buy It Now Seller sold 4 units at his last listing while the Auction Seller sold 1 unit. The Buy It Now Seller offers Lower Shipping as his edge."

The Auction guy may be selling MORE THAN 4 units per auction listing. But on the surface just looking at Ebay's closed items, you would never know.

Here's how he may be doing it.

Ebay has a feature called "2nd Chance Offer" (At least when I used this technique a little while ago they did). This feature allows you to make an offer to ALL of the people that bid on your auction but did not WIN.

What I would do is send the Offer to ALL bids that were still profitable to me.

When you make a sale with these 2nd Chance Offers, I noticed that these profitable sales DID NOT Show up in my closed items on ebay.

YEAH!!

Thus I was able to make MULTIPLE PROFITABLE SALES, but my Competition or any "Prying Eyes" would think that I only made ONE sale :->

There was a boxing movie where the underdog beat the big bad guy with the same strategy. I am forgetting the name of the movie, but he beat the badguy and said.

"Makem' Think You are Weak when you are Strong"

While My Competition may have been playing the game and using the # of units sold as their key Metric and focus.

I was PLAYING THE GAME DIFFERENTLY.

I was focusing on maximizing my Total Profit Per Listing

Actually in hindsight, that was NOT my only focus.

I was actually measuring down to the Avg Profit Per Visitor to my auctions as well as some other metrics.

But I digress.

So in your example Michael, the Auction Guy "May" Be doing better than what you can "See" just on Ebay.

The lower shipping price of his competition may only appear to be an edge. We would have to look at the 2 metrics I described above to know for sure.

Something to keep in mind when you are "Eyeballing" the competition for profitability on Ebay :->

Action Step: (Thanks Ankesh)

- Place a bid on the Auction Guy and strive to be the 2nd or 3rd bidder
- Did he send you a Second Chance Offer at end of auction close?
- How many others did he send an Offer to?

Duane Adolph

Originally Posted by MichaelRoss

Jason,

Thanks for the idea.

Would you mind Expanding on How you'd use this Gained Knowledge of Huge Demand? Or are you thinking along the lines of what MW suggested - a website based around just one product, with a Competitive Advantage of bonus items, bigger purchase options options, faster delivery, etc.

Your mention of Outsourcing reminds me of something Dick Smith said - which I mentioned a few weeks ago... find the best from around the world and copy them.

Harv T Eker also said, find what's working over there and bring it over here. It will get here anyway, due to creep, but by brining it over you beat the Lag Time.

But the trick is, Finding what is Selling.

Books are tied up with publishers. Although, Bulk Lots can be purchased from the Licensed Distributors. Such as one of the Large distributors down in Oz has one simple request... at least $200 worth of books must be bought (that's $200 worth at wholesale prices). But you will be competing with all other book sellers that people already feel comfortable doing business with.

Re Copying... After searching ebay, clicking Related Items and following that kind of see/click/see/click line, I stumbled upon something interesting...

Two Power Sellers in Australia selling the Same product. Only two of them. One sells with Buy It Now, the other sells via Auction. Without naming them outright and using like-wise names, one is called Vidshanty and the other is Discshanty.

The interesting thing is, the Auctions almost always reach the same Buy It Now price and go no higher (sometimes being only a few cents under). Which tells me, those who Bid also know of the Buy It Now seller. Both sellers, of this one particular item (and they both sell a range of items), make a sale during the Listing Life. Though I feel the Auction guy is limiting himself by only selling one at a time.

Further research reveals one of them is an Actual Store. They do shop front sales as well as a Large Mailorder Operation in addition to their Ebay side. And they keep their ebay side Separate from their store/mailorder side - you cannot call them and get the cheaper ebay prices, for example.

I don't know much about the other seller, yet.

What I found most interesting was the Product Sold and how one seller had obviously copied the Name of the other seller. The second half of the name was such a quirky word its use had to be deliberate.

I've been watching these two sellers for the past week and a half. The Buy It Now Seller sold 4 units at his last listing while the Auction Seller sold 1 unit. The Buy It Now Seller offers Lower Shipping as his edge.

The Auction Seller also offers a Two Unit deal. Again, the price of his Auctions stops just short - or right on the price - of buying two units from the Buy It Now Seller.

And they both use Auctiva http://www.auctiva.com Free Auction Software.

Michael Ross

Michael,

Thanks for those 7 Steps. That's Ingenius in its simplicity. Excellent!!

I'm wondering - and Duane, might like to chime in on this - how you'd go to Combine a couple of things.

The 7 steps work for a MLM product. That's cool (more than cool, but you know what I mean). How could they go applied to Top Sellers found on ebay?

For example: Following another breadcrumb trail and seeing what Other Items a seller has, I found a seller who is doing a nice Little business selling... Retractable Clotheslines - 6 line and 4 line.

His Completed show 8 listings with 5 sales and a gross of $368 for the last 10 days. (This is Australia ebay.)

So using the 7 Steps you'd Source a Retractable Clothesline, become a reseller and build a website specifically around that one product. And then, instead of competing on ebay - which you could do in addition - is run some classified ads offering these clotheslines via mailorder - buy over the phone or visit the website.

RETRACTABLE CLOTHESLINES. 4 or 6 line. Cheap cheap.
Visit www.retractableclotheslines.com or call 555-5555

(BTW, the above domain is for sale for $1,650. Looks like a DomainName Speculator bought it.)

A Domain bought through Doteasy http://www.doteasy.com would cost you $25 for the name and a year's hosting!. No CGI, but if you accept Paypal and use an outside free email bot like maybe FreeAutoBot http://freeautobot.com then you don't need CGI, right?

I found a guy on Ebay who sells Makita parts - drills without batteries, batteries without drills, chargers by themselves and so on. If you combine the items - drill, two batteries and a charger - so they make the same as the Kit you get from a harddware store, you are better off buying from the hardware store. But you cannot buy the separate items from most hardware stores.

His last 50 feedbacks - which covers around 8 to 10 days of sales - shows a gross of over $13,000 in sales. I don't know the markup on those items. But even if all he got was 20% he's doing $2,600 net for those sales. Probably closer to $4,000. Interesting. Parts Supplies.

Anyway. Mike... Duane... any Thoughts on that Twist.

Also, I'm thinking, a MLM that CURES a problem would be a Better Seller than a MLM Preventative. Like - and I'm spitball'n as I don't know if MLM sells these - a Cure for Tinea or would sell better than Tinea Prevention Cream.

Your thoughts on that?

A note about getting MLM Product KnockOffs made - most MLMs are Consumable. So if you are getting them made OS, make sure the ingredients used can be brought into your country without too much hassle. This is especially true with anything with a chemical in it - and has CAS Number - and Herbs.

E.g. Australia has some CAS Numbers which can be brought in in unrestricted amounts. Others can only be brought in in X Tonnes (at maybe a tenth of a gram or less per item, that still allows a lot of idividual SKUs). Others need a permit to bring in. And some are outright banned. You will NOT be allowed to bring an item in unless all CAS numbers have been checked against the NICNAS register.

With herbs, to stop Blight, no Oranges or products with Orange peel can be brought in - unless treated upon arrival by Customs. Who will charge $52.50 (I think the current fee is) per treatment - regardless of the size to be treated (one small packet of herbs or a whole pallet load).

So check the ingrediets list Before you have something made OS and then brought into the country. Otherwise you could be in for a nasty $$$ surprise cost which might blow your $ per SKU out of the Profitability Zone.

Michael Ross

You made some very good points Michael and asked some excellent questions...

First things first.

Yes, of course the "7-Steps" I talked about could be applied to a variety of businesses:

MLM
Ebay
Catalog/Mail Order
Retail

The steps are the same:
1. Research product lines (within the specific "selling sector") that interest you.
2. Find out what their top selling product is.
3. Become a reseller of that product.
4. Build a website specifically around that product.
5. Gain some sales and experience selling that product-- forget about recruiting. Focus on starting your businesses, fine tuning your infrastructure and building a customer list.
6. Research how to "knock-off" that top-selling product.
7. Start selling your own product.

Michael, I know you know this as do many people that study how things are sold, but the fact is most businesses are much better selling their product(s) in one medium than their are in other mediums.

For example take your eBay power sellers... without researching it myself I'm guessing these folks are doing nothing offline. I would doubt their websites outside the eBay world are "world-beaters". Sure these "power-sellers" may be cleaning up on eBay but are their websites optimized most effectively for search-engines? Do they spend a lot of time adding new and interesting content? Do they have good sales copy? Are they utilizing Adwords, Yahoo and MSN ppc? Are they pursuing joint-venture agreements with other site owners? Do they have an affiliate program?

I just think it's darned difficult to be great in all of these areas-- there are always openings for smart competitors... and I haven't even talked about offline opportunities, which most online ecommerce/eBay sites avoid like the plague.

I right there with you on the "cure" vs. "prevention" thing-- "cure" is a much easier sell. After studying several MLM's it appears to me that these companies do much better with their "cure" products-- I mean that just makes sense.

But regardless Michael it's all about finding and selling "top-selling" products-- products that are already being searched for by consumers so we do not have to "create" a market for our product, which we all know is super-expensive to do.

Heck Michael if it's a "prevention" product that's a top-seller so be it.

Did you ever read Gary Bencivenga's "Bullet" about "Fuzzy Dice"? Great read, here's the link... http://bencivengabullets.com/bullets.asp?id=16.

Here's the part that I think is absolutely critical to understand and master if someone desires a successful ecommerce-based business:

"Let's say, for example, that you sell car accessories. Now, you could create a website, and a series of Google and banner ads, trumpeting your product line, "Car Accessories."

Logical enough, right? It's what most companies do. Trouble is, people don't go online searching for "a product line." Almost nobody searches for "Car Accessories." That's way too broad. When I typed those words into my search bar, I got more than 49 million results! If I were a thorough shopper and wanted to check out each of these vendors for just 20 seconds apiece, I'd have to sit at my computer 24/7 for the next 31 years (without a single bathroom break)!

More than 49,000,000 advertisers are offering their wares under "car accessories," yet almost nobody searches for "car accessories."

But people do go online searching for a single product.

For example, they go online searching for "Fuzzy Dice" (you know, those tacky, spongy dice that dangle gaudily from the rearview mirror).

Or they'll search specifically for "Leather Steering Wheel Covers." Or "Car Stereo Subwoofers." Or "Mercedes Replacement Hood Ornaments," etc.

Since that's how people search, that's how you should sell—with a mini website devoted exclusively to Fuzzy Dice. Or another devoted to Leather Steering Wheel Covers. Or another offering Car Stereo Subwoofers, or Replacement Hood Ornaments, etc.

Sell the way your prospects buy—with a rifle shot like "Fuzzy Dice," not a shotgun like "Car Accessories." Like the wise old salesman said, intercept your hot prospects where they are looking for someone like you!"


As I said in an earlier post within this thread a "single-item" website should kick the living stink out of "multi-item" website when it comes down to selling that product!

Finally, YES I love consumable products. As we all know selling someone repeatedly is up to 15x easier than selling someone a product once and never seeing them again.

Where do you find products Here is a small list:

Trade Shows
Seminars
Classified ads
Old patents
Ask Friends
Public Domain works (disney used this method)
Exclusive rights
TV
Radio
Your own product

My wife just called I have to pick up my daughter. Go to my ezines I wrote about this subject in one of the ezines.