Product Research & Sourcing Insights

Find more products, list more effectively, and optimise your inventory with eBay’s exclusive insights tools

What is Product Research?

Product Research is an exclusive eBay insights tool. It's an effective way to research what your competitors are doing, how they’re doing it, and how you can improve your own listings on eBay. Free to all sellers, it's available under the Research tab in Seller Hub.

Product Research uses recent eBay supply, demand, and pricing data to help you determine what to sell, when to sell it, and at what price. Research recent marketplace price trends and real-world sales data for millions of items to optimise your listings and improve your sales velocity. Analyse markets, competition, hot trends and products to find the best-selling items on eBay.

With Product Research you can...

1

See how products and categories are performing across all eBay marketplaces.

2

View clear, easy-to-understand statistics, graphs and charts.

3

Get an overview of which products and categories are popular, successful strategies for attracting buyers and potential areas to improve.

4

Search by keyword or product and use the filters to get the information you want.

Why should I use Product Research?

Maintaining your customer base and identifying new opportunities is key to managing and growing your eBay business. Get ahead of the competition by finding out what they’re doing and how they’re doing it.

Product Research is a useful insights tool in a variety of cases, including...

Listing optimisation

It's easy to research the top performing listings and get hints on how to better optimise your own listings, by looking at listing details such as photos, price, item specifics and retail standards. You can also identify data-driven keywords that could attract customers to your listings.

Retail standard optimisation

Use Product Research to improve your retail standards and help you match the competition. You can immediately see high level metrics, such as the percentage of listings with free shipping and average postage costs. By analysing the top performing listings in more detail you can also see how top performing listings do in terms of returns and shipping options.

Market research

You can use Product Research to analyse trends in prices, sales volumes and product availability over time. By analysing this data, you can plan your inventory and pricing structure, better understand changes in supply and demand, and identify the sales volumes you can expect. The tool also allows you to filter by item condition or sales format.

Cross-border trade

Product Research allows you to research in other eBay domains and locations and enables you to make more informed decisions about geographical expansions into 22 global marketplaces.

Reactivate underperforming listings

For your underperforming listings, you can research Product Research to identify competitive listings and identify best practices for photos, price, item specifics and more. Some minor changes made to your own listings could make a huge difference in attracting buyers.

What is Sourcing Insights?

Sourcing insights uses real data from eBay such as sales and item specifics to identify future business opportunities. With Sourcing Insights, you can see which categories are performing and what’s selling well in those categories – so you can know what inventory to order in advance.

With Sourcing Insights, you can:

  • Identify categories with high demand and low supply.

  • See trends over time, and stay ahead of seasonal demand.

  • Use sales data to refresh your inventory based on what buyers are looking for.

Sourcing Insights is free for all Business Shop subscribers.

Benefits of Sourcing Insights

Sourcing Insights automatically highlights great opportunities for you in categories where demand is high and supply is low, as well as letting you search for opportunities yourself.

Browse through the categories where you sell and look out for the latest trends, top performing item specifics on products or browse the best performing listings.

You can also search for opportunities in the categories you don't sell. Just go to the Search & Browse tab and look for inventory sourcing insights in categories with potential for your business.

What other sellers say about Sourcing Insights

"Why guess and hope for the best? Sourcing Insights gives you all the answers, all you have to do is log in and start getting the facts!"

Diamonds Are Forever Ltd