The 4 Ways to Leverage Business Intelligence to Gain a Competitive Advantage over the Rest of the Pack On eBay

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The numbers seldom lie and the fact of the matter is that as far as ecommerce platforms go, it is well-nigh impossible to beat the indomitable eBay. eBay ranks among the pioneers of the industry and in this time period, they have evolved into one of the largest, if not the largest, ecommerce platform in the whole wide world. As of January 2016, they had a total of 162 million users. Additionally, eBay has 25 million sellers, 1 billion live listings and more than 800 million items listed in the eBay marketplace.

This means that if BI on eBay is well mastered and understood, you will be in a very competitive position to have a leg up on the competition and to reap the financial rewards of being a seller on eBay. A good piece of market research software should at the very least be able to offer you plenty of information on key metrics such as users, sellers, sales, searches(and the associated keywords), revenues generated on all platforms e.g. mobile and desktop devices and much more.

Let us explore the benefits that are available to you when you use market research effectively on eBay.

Discovery -- The market research tools will enable you to make decisions on pricing and packaging of your product on the basis of the completed listings on eBay, thus you will be able to engage in optimal pricing and packaging of your product to make sure that you get the best value for money.

The old adage is that the customer is always right and such tools will help you to make the decision that is based on customer's prior purchases so that you can make an informed decision about how to best go about marketing the product to you and your customer's advantage.

The research is done in real-time, allowing you to make the sales decisions in a matter of minutes in response to consumer feedback. It will provide information on the highest, lowest and average prices that a product has recently been sold for on eBay. You can thus list based on existing evidence as per the customers' requirements.

Research -- BI will allow you to engage in snooping on the habits of the competition. And a little espionage is often the best way of getting a clear picture of the market and the actors therein. You will be able to review all the sales info, listing strategies and pricing of your competition using eBay tools for sellers .

Additionally, you will be able to find out who the top sellers in that particular category are, narrow down your search to individual sellers, categories and items, the most popular products on eBay and the tactics that separate the top sellersfrom the rest of the pack.

Keywords -- The BI tools will go over and beyond, giving you valuable metrics on how your items and similar items are faring on the platform. For the unenlightened, the keyword simply means the search terms which you key into the search bar when you are searching for something to buy on eBay.

This means that you will have at your fingertips the very words that people use to look for the items and as such, you can tailor your listings' descriptions to appear at the top of the Search Engine Results Pages, SERPs.

By using advanced business intelligence software, you will be better placed to use the proper keywords on your title that will guarantee you the best sell through rates by using the most profitable keywords that give the best conversions.

Format--The format of your listing will go a long way in determining whether you sell or not and so the best way to go about this is to make sure that your formatting optimizes on CRO. Therefore, the BI software of choice should be able to provide the best listing format, options and features for all the items which you have put up for sale.

You will be able to narrow down on the timing for best conversions, the features to include on your items, the auction types and whether to offer a fixed price or to go the way of the auction. Having all these options available to you will give you that competitive edge that will ensure that the customers do get full value for their money.

In a nutshell, as an ecommerce retailer, you must make sure that you are going about the entire process the right way considering the fact that unlike a brick and mortar store, which is often limited by its customers having to be present at the physical store, in online selling you are competing with every other business in the world which is offering the same product as you are.

Therefore, any slight advantage that you can get over the competition can and will translate into big profits for you. Hence, you must start a good habit of collecting all the data that is related to your niche as soon as possible and using that data to make informed decisions about the state of your business and how to position yourself to take full advantage of the opportunities which the market presents.

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