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ShelfTrend is one of the most powerful, yet cost-effective solutions for eBay sellers. – Kam
If you are an eBay seller, you might have noticed a slump in sales off and on.
Sometimes, it may improve a little but most of the time, it never picks up and puts you out of business.
If your sales are going down and not improving for quite some time, your business might be at stake.
However, have you ever wondered why it is so despite the fact your account is in good standing, your price is very competitive and you have earned a reputation for even fast delivery with 100% Positive buyer feedback?
What you might be missing is analyzing eBay sales data.
A drop in sales is a common phenomenon in business whether you are a big seller like Amazon or you have a small business on eBay. However, smart sellers keep on collecting and analyzing sales data and chalk out their strategies accordingly.
There’s no underestimating how sales data can help you with decision-making. It’s essential for a number of reasons, including understanding your customers better, improving future performance, and decision making.
Quality data can lead to accurate sales insights and this is how every company large or small improves and grows over time.
Fortunately, eBay sellers can now access eBay Sales data to make better decisions and pick the products that are high on the search results with low or no competition.
Today, I am going to introduce you to ShelfTrend, a wonderful eBay analytics tool that over 50,000 sellers have chosen to guide them in growing and protecting their eBay sales.
Are you ready? Let’s get started…
ShelfTrend: In a Nutshell
ShelfTrend is an eBay analytics tool.
eBay captures data from millions of buyers on a daily basis. The data includes product information, pricing, seller details, quantity sold, eBay search rank, and much more. This data becomes available to you via ShelfTrend and can help you make crucial decisions and find opportunities.
To put it in simple words, ShelfTrend helps you make a better decision on what products to sell and which ones to discard.
Why Use ShelfTrend?
ShelfTrend takes eBay’s data and makes sense of it for you. They don’t make estimates but instead provide real data in a suite of reports that focus on answering specific business questions.
ShelfTrend allows you to filter, sort and drill into its reports for quicker and better analysis. You will see data presented in tables and charts that you can download into a spreadsheet in no time. This way, you can see through the data with numbers or via visual representations.
You can use ShelfTrend’s reports to:
- Discover an untapped niche with proven sales.
- Watch competitors and get to know their selling strategies.
- Determine how to price your products.
- Respond to new threats before they impact your search rank and sales.
- Monitor your eBay search rank.
How to Use ShelfTrend?
Let’s suppose you want to research Men’s Fragrances on the US eBay marketplace.
The very first step is to create a report. There are 4 reports to choose from. The first, the Top 500 Live Listings report (Figure 1) analyses the first 500 search results on eBay. This is the first 10 pages on eBay – where the sales are happening.
You can choose from all of the eBay marketplaces that eBay has. In this example, the United States (eBay.com) has been chosen.
You can include keywords and even eBay Seller ID if you want to narrow your data set, but for now, we are leaving it broad and just focusing on a category level.
Once you need to run the report to see who the main competitors are.
Once you run the report, you are presented with a summary of the top 500 listings.
In Figure 2 (as above), we can see from the top row of boxes that there are 308,125 listings for men’s fragrances currently on eBay.com. The price range of the top 500 listings is very broad, from $4.49 – $194.21.
The table of results is presented by SELLERS. You can quickly see who the biggest competitors are, how much stock they have (Qty), how much their listings have sold (Sold), their median price, and the brands that they sell.
In this example, we can quickly see that foreverlux and purfume-empire are big competitors that we will want to keep an eye on.
To better understand competitors, you can run a report using their eBay Seller ID.
See If Buyers Prefer Brands or Generic Products…
It’s time to see if the market is dominated by generic products or particular brands.
You can now change the view to BRANDS (Figure: 3).
In this example, brands are sorted by their highest eBay search rank. Clicking on any of the column headers will sort the results by that column.
People are mostly buying branded products, with Versace performing particularly well in both rank and long-term sales.
The brands all have quite a different median price points, so you can see which ones are best suited to your preferred price range.
You can also see the number of listings and sellers by the brand that is in the top 500, providing an indication of the competition level.
What listings are performing the best?
Here you can see what eBay is prioritizing – what brands and pack sizes are buyers looking for, and what is the price that you need to be able to compete against?
The above figure gives you further insight to make a better decision.
Download the report for an in-depth review
The listing details can also be downloaded as a .csv file (Figure 5), for further analysis in spreadsheeting tools, like Excel, or as input into other seller tools.
Where is an opportunity?
The Supply Demand report analyses up to the top 1000 listings to show sales and competition by price range.
In Figure 6 as above, the chart’s green bars show the distribution of listings by price range. The line chart shows the Total $Sold/Week for the cohort of listings.
For Men’s Fragrances, we can see that many of the listings are priced under $40, however, a lot of revenue is being generated from products listed for up to $60.
Let’s move further and see the next figure (Figure 7).
The chart title toggles to show the sales by price range for individual listings (Figure 7), so that you can see any stand-out listings or if the product offering varies across the price range.
ShelfTrend Pricing
ShelfTrend offers 3 Plans.
1. Basic Plan
The Basic plan has a free trial and offers:
- 20+ eBay marketplaces.
- Summary data on pricing, sales, listing volume, and sellers.
- Basic features.
- Data tables and charts.
- Up to 250 queries per month.
2. Professional Premium
This plan is good for you if you are already selling on eBay and want to give a boost to your business. This plan gives you:
- 20+ eBay marketplaces.
- Summary and listing-level data.
- Detailed competitor data.
- Keyword analysis.
- eBay Search Rank.
- Identify high-performing listings.
- Price & Competition analysis.
- Interactive data tables and charts.
- Download to .csv (spreadsheet) for offline analysis.
- Automatic scheduling of up to 3 reports.
- Save queries to the dashboard for quick access.
- Up to 750 queries per month.
3. Enterprise Setup
This is an Enterprise level plan and offers:
- Data structures and definitions to suit your business needs.
- Daily reports are delivered to your inbox.
- Work with the data on ShelfTrend’s online tool, download it for offline analysis or send it to the preferred data tool.
My Conclusion
I have gone through the entire tool and personally checked every nook and corner. My conclusion is that it is a wonderful tool that helps you go deep down with realistic eBay sales data, rather than gut-feel. The price is well affordable even by small sellers.
If you have seen a slump in your eBay sales or want to grow it further and beat the competition, I do recommend this tool to try for insights and growth.
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ShelfTrend definitely helps you to research the eBay marketplace and enables you to understand more about what buyers want, how much they’re willing to pay, who your competitors are, and the general movement of the industry.
The more you know, the more you grow!
Are you already using ShelfTrend like many others? If so, please do leave your comments in the box below. Do you like this article, do share it with your friends on social media so that they can also benefit.
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