If you manage an online shop or if you sell in an online marketplace such as Amazon or eBay, you probably know how important it can be to keep up to date on the latest trends and to look out for hot products that sell well on these platforms.
We wrote this article for you because we think that if you look into the best selling items for 2020, it could help you understand what are the most suitable products to sell on this platform and to forecast what could work in the next few years.
We have produced a case study, starting from eBay’s best selling items for 2020 which will also allow us to make some hypotheses for the future. If you want to sell on eBay, this guide could be very useful to you.
Why sell on eBay
According to the data published by eBay, sales in Q1 2020 declined by 3.8%, however in the first few weeks in April they picked back up and grew 20% week over week in some product categories. The latest numbers show the following, very important metrics:
- The active buyers on eBay increased by 1.75%, from 171 million in Q1-2019 to 174 in Q1-2020;
- Marketplace GMV (Gross Merchandise Volume) by 9% in comparison to last year’s quarter, for a total of $25B;
What to sell on eBay: let’s talk about categories
Let’s start straight away by analyzing a shortlist of the best selling items in the various eBay product categories:
- Electronics: aka the absolute queen of categories is the one that deals with electronic devices and accessories, in particular, mobile phone accessories were the ones that sold the most, with mobile screen protectors selling like candy.
- Fashion: this category came second, with accessories and sport-shoes as best sellers.
- Collectibles items: the third winner is indeed this category, which has been always particularly successful with those customers who wanted to collect merchandise of their favorite tv shows or passions, it is a hard category to scale, as you always need to be up to date with what’s trending!
If you want to find out more about the updated rankings and best-selling items, just follow this link.
We’ll tell you more, eBay provides you with a very useful tool known as What to sell. Be sure to check it out to find all the latest trending products and also the best selling ones in any category or subcategory on eBay, you can also check them out by country.
Another option you have is to do a search for choosing a specific period of time, and the software will analyze over 232 million objects sold in the 30 days prior to the chosen period of time. These statistics will highlight both the best-selling and the less-sold items, more, in general, they will highlight the most popular categories in the various countries, with detailed statistics and percentages.
What to sell on eBay: percentages in various countries
After having analyzed the sales by category, let’s have a look at the data regarding the single Countries. The percentages you will see indicate those insertions that got at least one sale. Analyzing the data, we can see that the highest percentage (38.3%) was registered in Germany, followed by the UK ( 37.5%) and then by the US (35.1%).
It might be surprising that the US market, despite it being the largest one, has got the lowest overall sales rate, however, after giving it some thought, we can deduce that it is because this country has the biggest number of insertions, and consequently, a wider competition.
In Germany, on the other hand, where it is more difficult to upload products on eBay, due to a series of restrictions, there is less competition, and therefore, the conversion is higher.
The conclusion we can make is that we cannot decide on the basis of our own beliefs, but we’ve got to analyze the data with the tools we presented in this article, in order to decide the right niche for the right product.
Conversions by product category
Now we want to share some statistics on single products, highlighting how, despite not being best sellers, they are still considered the best products in conversion rates.
The products that had the highest conversion rates:
- Diabetic test strips(87,66%)
- Fitness activity trackers (82,13%)
- Apple laptop (81, 22%)
- Video games console (80, 46%)
Category with the lowest sell rates:
- Diamond rings (3,41%)
- T-shirt (3,43%)
- Art Poster (4,13%)
- Bridesmaids formal dresses (4,38%)
These data point to very specific niche products, such as the diabetes stripes, which will have a smaller competition and therefore a high conversion rate, higher compared to more general products such as can be t-shirts.
The success of fitness tools proves to us how important it is to ride a trend, which can have a great conversion rate today but then fade with time.
Diamond rings, on the other hand, show us that, even if eBay is a very large market, it is not suitable for all kinds of products, especially for the very expensive ones, on which customers need a higher amount of trust in order to do the purchase.
Sell on eBay easily
eBay is a huge market, where it is possible to sell any kind of product and the statistics we have just looked into, we hope, will be useful to you in order to understand the best products for your market niche.
If you are looking for a supplier for your products, buying goods from China to resell on eBay can be very profitable: Chinese producers can provide you with anything, especially with new and trending items, that cannot be found from other suppliers.
Another good idea could be to develop a line of products that can summarise all the winning features present in your competitor’s products.
You fancy the idea but you think it could be hard to make into a reality? Surely it can be if you do everything yourself and if you do not speak Chinese, nonetheless today is your lucky day because there is a solution and it is Yakkyofy.
Thanks to this platform you will be able to easily import all the products you need from China.