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| Dropshipping 101 - Media Tracking |
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Updated 11/2/2007
What you'll want to determine while doing this research:
- How many companies are selling a product?
- Pricing; what's the minimum and maximum?
- How popular is the product?
1) How many companies are selling a product?
Too many, and there won't be any room for your offer; too few, and perhaps the product isn't popular
enough to sell well. Fortunately, there are several tools you can use to figure out what products fit into
these two categories.
- a) Comparison Shopping search engines
Froogle is Google's shopping search site; an example search: "
Wonder Weave".
The total count of pages (result x of x results) gives you some idea of how many sites are
selling a product. Sorting by lowest price first will let you know the minimum price;
conversely, sorting by highest price first will show the maximum price.
Bear in mind, this does not show you how many completed sales there are, for that, you'll
need eBay (covered later). Other places you can do similar research are
Yahoo Shopping,
Amazon,
Shopping.com,
MySimon.
2) Pricing; what's the minimum and maximum?
Price your offer too high, and sales will be few & far between. Price your offer too low, and
you won't make much for your efforts. Ideally, you want to strike a balance between those two extremes, and
make a comfortable margin on the products you sell.
- a) eBay Closed Auctions:
One good way to determine the your pricing is to look over the "closed" (completed) auctions on eBay.
You'll want to look for sales compared to no-sells, and what price the sales sold for. While eBay will
show you closed auctions, you have to register to see them, which is a nuisance. Fortunately, you
can search with Google instead. Go to the Google main page and enter the search:
<product name> closed site:ebay.com Replace <product name> with the name of the product
you want to investigate, then click the "SEARCH" button. Google will show you all the closed auctions
for that item, and you can click thru the links to view the prices, and whether the product actually sold
or not.
3) How popular is the product? How many people are looking for it?
What other ways are there to find the "Hot New Products"?
- Weblogs related to "As Seen On Tv" products
These pages review commercials currently on television:
infomercial-reviews.org
reviewinfomercials.com
fitnessinfomercialreview.com
infomercialindex.com
- Infomercial Monitoring Services
These are subscription services that provides lists of what ads are showing on television.
imstv.com
Jordan Whitney, Inc.
- Monitor your competitors
Ideally, you'd rather start selling a product before your competitors do,
but "better late than never" is an adage that's good to remember. You don't want to lose
sales because you're not carrying a product that other stores have in stock. So
Search Google for your direct competitors, bookmark their "New Products" pages, and check them often!
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