No Research!

Top reasons people avoid market research.

"Research is too hard!"
Making money is harder than losing money. This is why 40% of all new businesses fail within 1 year. 80% fail within 5 years. Informed people will always will always have an advantage over the uninformed. We do our best to keep the research simple and actionable.

"I hate numbers."
Keep it down to 3 key numbers - total sales, average end price and average success rate.

"I use eBay's free completed listings page" Great start!!!

"I will see how bad I'm doing."
Knowing what is real is the best thing that can happen to your business. You can take action in the right direction. If you are performing poorly in your market, study the best seller in your market. Model your listings based on their listings (not copy) to improve your sales. If your market is bad - exit it.

But if you are here reading this page, I bet you are a pretty good business person and will be pleased with your results.

"I'm too busy."
Yes, undoubtedly you are busy. There are two ways to increase your effective eBay sales hourly wages: reduce time per sale or increase your end prices. I strongly suggest you work on increased profits by improving sales techniques rather than cutting corners.
High payback activities: market research, careful inventory selection, writing thorough descriptions, detailed photographs, customer service and communication with buyers.
Low payback activities: listing poor selling items, selling value items, time saved skipping good listing techniques.

"Statistics are just lies" Actually, 42.7% of all statistics are made up. ;-)

"It's too expensive"
Consider the cost of trial and error. Inventory cost, insertion fee (>$.20), final value fees ( >8% of sales), PayPal fee (1.9% - 2.9%), possible loss on sale (?) and the opportunity cost of your time. It's an expense that will pay you back in increased revenue or decreased cost.

Find the right research for you.