Where Do I Find Emerging Hot Products Before My Competition?

By Steve Myers, Online Marketing Consultant

What's Hot? eBay sellers race around looking at the hot lists to find out what to sell next. Hot lists help you figure out which products are increasing in demand on eBay.

Don't Get Burned

Hot lists can burn you. Why? Because once a new product makes the hot list, everyone knows. It's no secret anymore. And the time when you'll make the most profit on a new item is before everyone finds out about it.

Once that happens, competition drives down the price. So when do you want to sell a new item? That's right, when it's still an undiscovered gem. Sounds simple, but how do you do it?

How Hot Lists Work

First of all, you need to understand how eBay creates the hot lists. Many of them come out every three months. eBay monitors which products and categories are rising in demand. They compile that information into a hot list.

So you have as much as three months to discover emerging in-demand products and make your money. Do it before the crowd, and you'll be on to the next profitable hot item before the price starts to fall.

Lemmings and Robins

As a kid, I remember watching a nature program about lemmings. It was fun to watch the furry little guys racing after one another. That is, until they reached the cliff.

By the hundreds, the cute little creatures would faithfully follow the crowd. Even once they hit the water below, they didn't clue in that the little guy in front was leading them to disaster. On eBay, as in nature, following the crowd doesn't always end so well.

But counterpoint this with the robin. Early in the morning, it gets up early. While the soil is still moist, it's busy pulling fat worms from the soil. Had it waited until the sun had warmed it and made it more comfortable, its task would have been all the harder. Once the soil dries out, it's hard work to extract those same worms.

Discover Profitable Products BEFORE Hot Lists Drive the Price Down

Lemming or robin? Which will you be? In this article, you'll learn how to spot emerging products before they make the hot lists. You'll learn to earn more during the narrow window of time when a product's most profitable.

High Demand, High Price

So what's the first clue that a product is a winner? The first clue is that it's in high demand. So how do you tell when buyers are scrambling for a product? Simple, its listing success rate is high.

The listing success rate tells you what percentage of the time an auction closes successfully. By "successfully" we mean someone bid on and won the item. Money exchanged hands.

Lazy Can Be Profitable

How do you find out how often auctions close successfully. The hard way is to watch MANY auctions and see if they close. Maybe I'm lazy, but I don't have time for that. Let me show you the unfair advantage I use to "cheat."

Auction research is my secret weapon. I use the HammerTap auction research tool to find products in high demand.

Discovering A Real-World Hot Item Early

Let's use HammerTap to see what I can find out about the Playstation 3 video game machine. It was released on November 17, 2006 to huge demand. Let's see what HammerTap tells us about it.

Make the most of your auctions with research!

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Determining what works and what doesn't when it comes to your listings requires research. Anything less puts you at risk of not making the sale or not making as much as you could be on each sale. A research tool like HammerTap helps you bypass the costly trial and error process by quickly giving you the key information you need for profitable online auctions.

Why not take HammerTap for a FREE test drive? We'll give you 10 days to put HammerTap to work for you. Use its power to determine:

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As a bonus, you'll receive 10-lesson Power to Profit course to help you immediately see the effects research can have on your auctions. We'll also throw in selling tips from Industry Experts in our members-only Auctionography newsletter.

You owe it to yourself to take the guesswork and risk out of your auctions. Try HammerTap free for 10 days. If you are not absolutely sure you'll increase your eBay profits by the $19.95 subscription price, you're free to cancel. It costs you nothing to prove to yourself there's a more profitable way to eBay.

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