We all have to make purchasing decisions every day and what we buy will have dramatic consequence for our business. It is particularly hard if we are dealing with new products that we have little idea of what they will do and there no formula for making the right decision. The best we can do is to try to get as many different perspectives as possible and then choose a course of action that seems reasonable. Here are some sites that may be able to help you decide.
The first site, I recommend is
In Amazon, you will find a best seller's list here.
You can break it down to department and category and see what are the best sellers in that group of stock items. You will also find there some other interesting list of similar products, including new and gift. Looking through the lists, I am sure it will give you some ideas where the market is moving.
The next site is eBay. Enter the category, once they are up, on the left-hand side, you will see a button called sold listings, if you click on that you will show you when and how many were sold on eBay and what price people are paying for it there. This I am sure will give you a lot of ideas too. Consider the delivery fee carefully as an item that sells well at $19 with a week delivery at a fee of $20, now consider that you could sell it for as you can also offer instant inspection, hands on advice and delivery.
Finally, the last site is will discuss is alibaba
Enter in the category and sort by "Most Orders." I am sure you will get lots of ideas here too plus some pretty good prices.
At this point, some market research by going into a shop that sells similar products would be in order. Once you get a feel, you may be able to make an informed decision.
One of my clients, noting that in his medium size shopping center no-one was selling seriously mobile cases but they were in the major centres thought that he could do something better than magaziness. So after looking at the Australian wholesales he made a decision to bypass the Australian distributors by buying direct from China, cases that were selling well on ebay and amazon. He now sells quite a lot of these cases and has replaced much of his magazines with cases.
