How To Find Hot Items To Sell On eBay Using Terapeak

In this article I’m going to give you my updated 2020 strategy for finding the best items to sell on eBay using TeraPeak. The best products to sell on eBay are the ones that are in high demand but have low seller competition. To find items like these we’re going to follow three steps.

1. Use Terapeak to research and find a hot niche to sell in

Terapeak is an incredibly powerful tool that collects information statistics and analytics on the past 365 days’ worth of listings on eBay (including some shopify stores). Using the data, you can analyse products that you’re interested in selling and get some very important information, such as the average selling price and the average success rate for the item.

You can also track your competitors and see what items they are successfully selling. Terapeak is a critical tool in this tutorial. One of the tools included in Terapeak is the hot research tool, this lets you see which categories and subcategories currently doing well on eBay. This is the tool that I’m going to use for step one.

This here is the homepage for Terapeak, and you can sign up for a free 7-day trial by clicking ‘Try it Now’.

I’ve already got an account so I’m just going to switch over to it now and show you what it looks like. When you sign up for account, you’ll see this dashboard:

You can add to it your email, your eBay account, and Amazon accounts that’ll look a bit different.

Go to the research tab and then click on hot research.

Now we’re going to check out all  the different categories and subcategories that are really hot right now on eBay.

You can see that pistols in the airsoft category are very hot right now and they’ve got a 78.79% success rate.

That means them that if you were selling an airsoft pistol, it would have roughly a 78.79% chance of success, because of the fact that has such a high buyer demand and low seller competition.

I’m just going to scroll down here and look for categories that have a 33 perceived or higher success rate, because it means that on average those items will sell within one to three weeks on average.

Just taking a look here I can already see that there are some categories that you definitely want to avoid, because they require specialized knowledge. For example, I’m taking a look at the coins and paper money categories like these three cent nickels:

You would probably want to avoid this, because the fact that it requires specialized knowledge and sourcing these especially as a beginner would be extremely difficult. So you want to look for a category that is a lot easier.

For example, I’m looking at this category: mens athletic shoes:

This category excites me because of the fact it’s really easy to source mens athletic shoes. If you think about it there’s lots of ways to do it, from thrift stores, garage sales, or Craigslist.

This here would be a really great category for a beginner to sell on eBay using Terapeak. Taking a look at it, it’s got a 35.23% success rate:

So, it meets our criteria.

Moving forward, I’m going to be using this as our example category.

2. Use Amazon to brainstorm a list of potential items that you might want to sell

What we’re going to do now is go to Amazon and look at the bestselling items (aliexpress best sellers will also work) for the niche that we selected in step one. We will then analyse this list of items deeper and in step three, we’re going to find out which items have high buyer demand, but low seller competition.

Come over to the Amazon best sellers list

Then you want to find the category that you’ve selected, so I’m going to select shoes.

It’s really simple. All you have to do is go through and make a list of the different shoes or items that are in the best sellers category – there should be a hundred items listed here:

So you just go through and make a list. Then we’ll take this list and we’ll analyze it further in step three.

3. Use Terapeak to figure out which items on our list have high demand, but low seller competition

The goal of this step is to identify which items on our ‘ from step two are easy to sell. If the item is easy to sell, then we know if we can source the item for a significantly lower price than the going price on eBay, we’ll be easily able to flip it for a profit.

Come back to your dashboard in Terapeak and click on the research tab, do not click on product research 2.0, click on product research.

Do a search for one of the products that you found in step 2, as shown here:

Then come and change this to be a 30  day period:

Then just do a search. We want to check out what the average  selling price is and we want to check out how much sellers are charging for shipping, because that lets us know when we’re sourcing this item say at a thrift store how much we can afford to pay for it, while still making a tidy profit.

We also want to check to see if this item has a sell-through rate of at least 33%. In this case it very clearly does, so this is a great item. This indicates that there is tons of demand and that if we pick this item up we’ll be able to flip it quickly.

Come up here and click on bid  auctions:

We’ve got one other thing that we want to check and then click apply filters:

What we want to do is check out the item to see if it has a bid per listing ratio of at least two. In this case here we can see that it is 4.52 which is fantastic. What that means is that for every listing for this item there are on average 4.52 bids.

That means that there is a lot of buyer demand, but low seller competition. This indicates it will be an easy item to flip, if we pick this up. So, this would be a great item to buy.

And that’s it – that is how you locate low competition, but high buyer demand items to sell on eBay. Once you’ve created your list, it’s time to actually source those items for a price low enough for you to make a profit.

One sourcing strategy is using Craigslist, for example I found a pair of Asics GEL Nimbus Mens athletic shoes on Craigslist selling for $50.

I knew to search for these shoes on Craigslist, because I discovered them using this three-step process. Using the strategy, I had already identified that they have an average selling price on eBay of roughly $87.

It also met the criteria of having a sell-through rate higher than 30% plus they meet the criteria of having a higher than 2:1 bid to auction ratio on eBay.

Using a profit calculator, I discovered that after eBay fees the profit would be roughly $25 on these shoes.

That is more than a 40% return on your original investment and is an investment that you could feel safe making, because you have used this three-step process and already figured out that these shoes were a great item to sell.

Another strategy of course is sourcing at garage sales and thrift stores, but it’s a lot easier to browse through the items there, if you’ve already done your research in advance.

Finally, if you think that you found an item that has potential for wholesaling then you can use Alibaba to source bulk product from China. By using this strategy to sell on eBay using Terapeak, you can always be making a profit.