• Initial set up is much easier.  Since you are focusing on a group of similiar products you can use push to marketplace to quickly and easily add all the available products in your chosen category to your eBay listings.
• It has been proven that niche market eBayers gain a signifcant increase in their upsales (meaning a customer who views you listing for a digital camera sees that you are also selling the lens he wants and he buys that too).  If you are selling unrelated items like cameras and belt buckles then you are not going to have much chance at the upsell.
• You will generate repeat cusomters who have shopped with you before and had a positive experience.  When you sell Joe Blow a printer and he later needs ink or paper he is more likely to return to you to make his purchase because he already trusts you and he assumes you will have the related products he wants, and if you have followed the niche model you will!  Since you are selling printers your niche would include these accessories and you would pick up the sale.  eBay allows members to add sellers and eBay stores to their favorites list so they can easily come back to the vendors they have used and trust.
• A niche market is much more manageable and logical.  It doesn't really make sense to be selling power tools and wide screen t.v.'s....you see the point?  And keeping up with your inventory is a very simple matter when you are working from a niche model.

There several invaluable FREE resources that can give you a great upper hand selling on eBay.  Click here for eBay for Business and Here for eBay University. Also learn to keep an eye on the hottest trends of what is selling online right now by checking the hot items on Pricegrabber.com and Shopping.com everyday.

So now lets suppose you have chosen Cookware as your niche market.  You build your eBay listings using only products that fall into the Cookware category.  You follow the rest of this guide to appropriately price your items, fine tune your listings  and drive traffic to your listings. 

When you feel you have all your cookware products running smoothly you are ready to expand to a related category like blenders or microwaves.  Each time you complete a category you move on to the next one and the list of items you are selling will grow and grow....and you will still have a niche market. 

There is no limit to how far you can go with this.  With enough time and effort you could find yourself running on a department store type model.  The key is one category at a time.  Make sure every product in that category is 100% optimized before moving on to a new category.

• When first starting out, select three or four products from un-related niches (bedding and GPS devices, for example) and test them out on eBay to see what sells before you commit to a niche and focus your time and effort on that one group of products.
• Don't chose a niche that is already highly saturated on eBay. You can easily determine the saturation level by doing a couple of ebay searches for products in the niche you are considering.  For example if i go to eBay and search for "Cell Phones" thousands of listings are going to pop up.  Your listing would get lost in the shuffle.  Search for "Underwater Camera" and you will find it is a much less crowded category.  If you check the completed listings you will find most listings sold telling you this is a good opportunity for a niche market.  It is always a good idea to check the completed listings for a more accurate idea of how well the item is selling overall on eBay and for how much.
• When chosing products avoid items that have a low quantity available.  It may seem like an easy sell but when quantities are low you take a huge risk that the item will sell out before you sell it.  In some cases products with a low quantity are actually already sold out and have not been updated yet.  You can always contact customer servie to get more information as to the availability.  My general rule is not to sell products that have a quantity of less than 25 in stock
• Do eBay searches for any item you are interested in.  You can see how much competition there is and also by checking the completed auctions you can get a picture of how much people are paying for the item.  Prices can vary greatly and you may ask yourself why.  It is all about the presentation which we will discuss more in the Things To Avoid section.
• Don't get to caught up in how much the retail price of the items are.  The important thing is what they are actually selling for and how steady the demand is.  I have a product that I sell for $5.95 plus $3 shipping.  I profit only $2.30 per sale but that adds up fast when you sell 50 or 100 a week.

Once you have selected your inital products ( I recommend 20-50 to start depending on you ambition) it is time to set up the pricing through Push to Marketplace so your products will be ready to be sent to your eBay account.  By now you should be familiar with this tool.  If not please take some time to explore it now and contact customer service if you need help or have questions.  The final step of the push process is setting your pricing and shipping.  When you are ready to move on to that step click the link below.

Click here to move on to Product Pricing or use the menu bar at the top of the page to select another option.