A mistake that many new resellers make is to operate on assumptions about what will sell and what won’t, and what will be profitable and what won’t. These assumptions are often founded on the interests or past experiences of the new reseller, and not founded on any understanding of the fundamental marketplace dynamics. Supply and demand are those dynamics, and all new resellers need to
So how can you check demand for a product to resell?
Use tools such as Keepa and Terapeak to analyze past sales of the item on Amazon and eBay. Check the recent sold listings on eBay, Poshmark, Mercari or other marketplace sites. Use Google Trends to analyze search traffic for the item on Google to gauge overall demand.
In general, look for ways to look at data. Use numbers to build your understanding, and avoid operating on assumptions.
Let’s break it down.
Use Amazon to Understand Overall Demand for an Item
This is a key idea that applies to all resellers, not just Amazon sellers.
You can use Amazon to gauge the overall public demand for an item, even if you plan to sell it on other platforms.
Sure, demand varies between platforms. If you sell on Etsy, you’re dealing with a whole different business model, and you can’t really use Amazon to gauge the demand of your item. But if you are selling standard items that do have listings on Amazon, you can use the sales history on Amazon to gauge the overall interest in that item from the public. That’s because Amazon is the largest e-commerce marketplace in the US, and if an item is an extremely fast seller or slow seller on Amazon, it largely tells us whether people want the item or not.
That doesn’t mean you can expect the same sales volume if you’re selling the item outside of Amazon. Since Amazon has more traffic than the other sites, reduce your expectations down accordingly. But it gives us a starting point.
How to See Demand for Amazon Items
So how do we start to understand demand for an item on Amazon?
Keepa is one of the best ways. This is a Google Chrome plugin which allows you to see marketplace information directly in your web browser when you are viewing items on Amazon.com. Since it is a plugin, you don’t need to go to a specific website or app to see the data – it appears right there on the listing page of the item you are viewing.
The Keepa graph shows a number of incredible insights, such as the best seller rank of the item, past sales (shown as a drop in the best seller rank), prices for ‘New’ listings, prices for ‘Used’ listings, and other great snippets of information. All of this is displayed for a timeframe that you select, which allows you to see trends over time.
Since we can use Keepa to see the sales history of a given listing, it is extremely powerful at providing a view into the demand of the item.
Can’t We Just Use the Amazon Best Seller Rank?
Not really, no. The Amazon BSR, or ‘sales rank’ as it is more commonly called, is a misleading data point. This is due to how the sales rank increases over time after each sale, and then dips again when another sale happens. Essentially this leads to an abnormally high sales rank just before a sale, and an abnormally low sales rank immediately after a sale, which can be misleading.
For example, if a book you are considering buying for resale was at a sales rank of 4 million last week (showing that it is a very slow selling item), but it sold yesterday, we can expect the sales rank of that book to immediately drop to around 100,000 after the sale (which for a book is a reasonably fast selling item). It will start to rise again immediately, but if I look at that book today – one day after the most recent sale – it will seem that the book is a fast seller, and worth buying, if I look only at sales rank.
So we need to use ways to get around this, and make sure we are not misled by the sales rank of an item. Some Amazon selling apps use an average of the past 6 months of sales rank as a way to give a more accurate number, which is a good way to look at it.
We Need to See the Actual Number of Sales
ScoutIQ, the popular Amazon scanning app for for your phone, shows the actual number of days that an item has sold in the past 6 months. They call this the eScore of an item, and it is a fantastic way to see the actual demand of an item and avoid using the sales rank at all in our buying decisions. This is a highly recommended approach for Amazon sellers using scanning apps to source, as it helps you to see the real data while in the store.
ScoutIQ also has a database of Amazon items which you can download to your phone, so you can source items without even having an internet connection. Using a Bluetooth scanner connected to your phone and using ScoutIQ on database mode is an excellent way to quickly understand demand on the fly and make good buying decisions.
If you don’t need the information while out sourcing and instead you’re at your computer, Keepa is the best way to view the recent sales.
How to See Demand for Non-Amazon Items
One of the best ways to gauge demand for items that you can’t see on Amazon, such as used clothing, art, used furniture, rare items, and many other categories, is to use EBay sold listings.
EBay sold listings and completed listings can give us a strong sense of demand for an item on the eBay platform. They tell us how often there have been recent sales for an item, and what prices the item sold for. This is powerful information for checking demand, but also for pricing and re-pricing your items.
To check eBay sold listings, you don’t need any third party tools or subscriptions. You can simply follow these steps:
- Navigate to eBay.com and search for your item. Use keywords that are not too broad, so the results are as close as possible to being the exact item you are looking for comps on.
- On the desktop version of eBay, you will see Advanced Search Options to the left of the listings on the results page after you complete your search.
- Scroll down this list until you see the check box for ‘Completed Listings’ and ‘Sold Listings’.
Checking the box for Completed Listings will change the results that you see to only show listings that have ended. This will include items that sold and items that ended without selling. That’s a powerful view when checking demand, because you can now see if there are many ended listings that did not sell, and few sold listings, which tells you that the supply outweighs the demand on the item.
Checking the box for Sold Listings will filter the results to only show the items that actually sold. This shows us the price that the item sold for, which is powerful information. You can now start to understand if an item sells frequently or not by looking at the dates of the most recent sales, and the number of them. By reviewing the prices, you can also take a quick gauge on where you would set your price if you wanted to resell the item, which you can then use to calculate profitability.
Are there any tools that help with checking comps on eBay?
Yes! With an eBay store subscription, you have access to Terapeak.
Terapeak is a tool that allows you to access real time sales data from eBay. Using powerful filtering and search functionality, you can then research the demand and supply for millions of items on the eBay platform.
Terapeak is more powerful than checking comps directly on eBay.com, because it allows you to input timeframes – start dates and end dates – which are extremely helpful in gauging seasonality and trends in your research. The tool also provides visual representation and graphs of the data, which is a great way to interpret it.
Are there any other tools to use to check demand on an item to resell?
Google Trends is a great tool to keep in your back pocket. This is a site created by Google which allows us to get insights into user search behavior. Since web search is one of the first places that most consumers go to start their buying journey, understanding search traffic for specific items or item categories is certainly worthwhile.
At the very least, you should understand your niche or the item categories that you sell the most of. Using Google Trends can show you the seasonality and trends of those items over the course of a given year, which can help you to decide when you want to double down on your listings.
Some seasonality may not be obvious. Of course if you want to resell camping gear, you know that the summer will be your busy season. But did you know that car brands such as the Mini Cooper also have clear seasonality? Searches for Mini Cooper on Google increase during the summer. This is likely the case with a lot of the items that you resell.
Or clothing resellers, seasonality is much more predictable, and you are surely on top of it already. But for anyone who resells in other categories, make sure to check out Google Trends to help you understand the demand in your area, and how it changes during specific time periods.
By looking at a multi-year view on Google Trends also, you can see if demand for your items is growing over time, or shrinking over time. That can help with your scaling decisions and planning for the coming years.
Demand is Everything
It’s critical to base your buying decisions on actual data about demand. Don’t make assumptions. Don’t try to build a business on an obscure niche just because you like it. Make sure to confirm that the demand is real, and always stay up to date on that demand. Check it continually, even when you’ve built up experience.
I hope this helped you to think differently about demand in your reselling business. If you want more tips and strategies for reselling, make sure to check us out on Instagram (@resellingtips), where we share frequent quick tips to help you to scale your business.
Do you think understanding demand is important in reselling? Do you have any other tips on how to research it? Let us know in the comments below!
