Niches, Takeover, and Amazon aStores

Personally delivered to you by the author of "Selling on 'the River' - The eBay Seller's Guide to Amazon.com"

In This Issue

1. How to find a niche market using Terapeak
2. Why you should consider an Amazon aStore
3. "I won $35,000 of product on eBay while I slept"

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1. How to find your niche using Terapeak

This year at eBay Live! I'm speaking on "Choosing Your Niche and Pricing for Profit". There is all kinds of information on the internet about how to find a good niche market. I sifted through a lot of information, and thought I'd share a little of what my presentation will cover. I am going to shamelessly promote Terapeak as the best eBay research tool. I've tried eBay's Marketplace Research, and HammerTap's eBay Research tool. But to me, Terapeak beats them both. They've just revised their program and I believe it's better than ever. You can try Terapeak for free here.

First, let me share what I found on the question, "What is a niche?" Let me quote Philip Kotler, who some refer to as the father of the marketing industry: He says "An ideal market niche would have the following characteristics:

• The niche is of sufficient size and purchasing power to be profitable
• The niche has growth potential
• The niche is of negligible interest to major competitors
• The firm has the required skills and resources to serve the niche effectively
• The firm can defend itself against an attacking major competitor through the customer goodwill it has built up.

In all the research I've done, that is the best explanation of a niche market I've seen. There are literally thousands of niche markets on eBay that you can exploit. Keyword and sales research can help you find them.

Here is the example I came up for my presentation at eBay Live!, using Terapeak. Outside my office window, are three birdfeeders. I love feeding birds. I've seen people plop down $100 for a birdfeeder and a pole. So I chose birdfeeders to begin my search for a niche.

• Step 1: I used Terapeak to search completed eBay listings over the past 30 days that included "bird feeder". I looked for a good average selling price, a good number of items, and high sell-through rate. Bird Feeder results: Avg Price: $15.14; Items 7,745; Sell-through 27.51%
• Step 2: I noticed in the results the word "Squirrel" appears in the higher-end bird feeders. So I added that term to my search. "bird feeder squirrel" and got these results: Bird Feeder Squirrel: Avg Price: $29.92; Items 552; Sell-through 48.28%
• Step 3: Seeing the jump in sell-through rate and average price encouraged me to whittle the results even further. In these results I see the word "Pole" quite a bit, and selling very well. So I now search for "bird feeder squirrel pole". Bird Feeder Squirrel Pole: Avg Price $67.92; Items 23; Sell-through 67.22%

Now I've found a nice little niche where I can begin working. Looking at the results I can see a few specific products that I should research, and try to obtain. If it was me, I would use Worldwide Brands OneSource product to find a vendor and strike a deal for product. I have been using this system to find niches on eBay for my niche stores. I'll provide updates to all those stores in upcoming issues, if you've wondered about using the "Build a Niche Store" program, or you have a store you'd like me to feature in the future, send me an email, I'd be happy to share what I've learned so far.

2. Why you should consider an Amazon aStore

Whether you're selling on Amazon yet or not, you can still make money with an Amazon aStore. Amazon's affiliate program is called "Amazon Associates" and you can find it at the bottom of the home page. Sign up, and you can sell virtually anything on Amazon using a variety of widgets and links. One of the best tools they provide though, is the aStore. An aStore (affiliate store) is a collection of products you choose, categorize, and display on your own website or blog. You can check out my aStore at GenuineSeller.com as an example.

I've chosen to sell books - none of which I wrote - that I think my visitors would find helpful. If a visitor buys a product, I get paid a commission. You can customize the look of your store quite easily, and if you're familiar with editing .css files, you can really get creative with the fonts and layout.

As for what you should offer...if you have a blog about digital cameras, or well, anything you can find on Amazon, you can offer an incredible selection to your visitors. The higher the prices, the higher your commissions - so find a good niche with a high profit potential and use the aStore to tap into it.

3. "I won $35,000 of product on eBay while I slept"

Maybe some of you are wondering why I haven't talked about listing on Etsy.com yet. Well I've been a little busy.

I woke up Monday morning and checked eBay only to find I'd "won" over $35,000 worth of merchandise overnight. I also could not log into my Gmail account, and my Amazon account had been locked down, with all items ended, and PayPal was restricted. If all that's not enough, we had a little earthquake here about 10:45AM that, although small, leaves a person a bit "on edge". In case it ever happens to you - here's what I did.

1. I used eBay Live Help and got right through. The criminals had changed my password so I could not log in, by the way. The Live Help person was extremely quick about fixing things, and helped me get access to my account within 10 minutes. He was able to flag the sales as "null and void" so I didn't have to deal with a lot of mad sellers.

2. I desperately needed to get into my gmail account, but could not find a way to contact Google. I finally used a customer support number for Google AdWords (which is all connected to my Gmail account). They got me through, and corrected the problem within about an hour. TIP: If you use Gmail, make sure you have a back-up email that you can access. When trying to reset my password, they sent a new one to my secondary email address. I haven't used that address in so long I couldn't get into it - so I was stuck. If you ever need to call Google and speak to a human - try 1-800-2GOOGLE and you should be able to get some help.

3. I used the Amazon Click-to-Call feature, which I discuss in "Selling on 'the River'". It worked beautifully. I spoke with a real human, who called me on my phone. He got me "unfrozen" and back on track within a few minutes. The only down-side was all of my listings were canceled, and I had to relist them. My monies were safe however, and that's the most important thing. If you ever need Amazon support, use this link to reach them.

4. PayPal was the most difficult. I really wanted to speak to a human, since my account seemed to be stuck on "Under review". The customer service numbers I have are: 888-215-5506 and 888-221-1161, but I couldn't get relief there. I cheated on this one and called an inside contact. It was handled in seconds. Unfortunately, it makes me wonder what would have happened if I hadn't known someone on the inside. Scary.

I hope this helps teach a lesson though. It can happen to even experienced internet users. And the second lesson is: always have backups, email, payments, even the inventory I had to relist on Amazon. Backups helped a lot. Now as for the earthquake - so far it looks like the Nigerians are not responsible.

See you next week!

Tagged as: Amazon, eBay, terapeak