eBay Service Import Biz idea

Service Business Idea

I've been lightly reviewing sales of premium brand name items on eBay, to get an
idea
of the magnitude of the business done there.

I see power sellers who have a steady supply of items, that offer them on
"auction"
wherein they have a "buy it now" price that is a well above wholesale, and a
reserve
price that is a bit above wholesale. It appears the game is to try to auction
the item
at a good price, or at least "sell it now" and make a small profit above cost.

In essence, these are people competing on price in the luxury brand category.
I found an interesting pattern so far; an item is placed for "auction" for a
week, and
very often there are zero bids, and certainly no one buying at the "buy it now"
price.
When it goes a week with no bids and the "auction" ends, the item shows up
again,
from the same seller, now on auction, same prices and reserves, but now it is up
for
28 days. Curious behaviour.

My reaction was, these prices, what with the reserves, seem to me to be simply
the
price you would find at a store that was having a good sale.

At a store you are guaranteed it is the real McCoy. From a power seller with
5000
auctions and 100% satisfaction feedback, you could probably be assured there the
item is genuine as well. But you cannot be as confident as at a store.. So why
bother
with such a minimal `savings"? That's just me, but I bet say Coach Leather
would love
to have a study done to find out exactly what is happening in sales of their
products
on eBay.

It would take a matrix of coach SKUs, the time, date, duration, price, reserve,
indeed
all the eBay info on the seller, and then track the activity in each item, say
over a
years period... using eBay's free "watch this item" and "watch this seller"
features.

You would end up with a ton of data, which might be useless to you or anyone
else,
valuable only to Coach Leather who could use it in many ways. First, quantify
eBay
activity in relation to total Coach activity, a gold mine of info right there.

Insurance companies would find it valuable... say 300 Coach saddle bags
disappeared
off the docks in New Jersey, and an insurance company had to pay a $55,000
insurance claim. The fact that a "power seller' in Georgia sold 300 genuine
coach
saddle bags at wonderful prices to 100% satisfied buyers would be a good
starting
place to insurance loss investigators.

No doubt there would be many other uses for the info, it seems to me this would
be a
good service business.

Steps to take:.

1. Try to buy the info from eBay, see if they sell it. eBay would be best
placed to
gather this info, and I would be surprised if they did not already. On the other
hand,
it might be the case that eBay does not gather the info simply because that may
displease their top users.

If they do not sell it, even thought they can, that means the way is still open
for you
to do it.

Next, I would contact Coach Leather, and try to buy it from them. Simply tell
them
you are studying sales of Coach Leather on eBay, and you want to buy it from
them.
If they say we have it but do not sell it, then end of story. If they say "we
don't have
it... but would like it..." then the opportunity is wide open. (If they have it
and sell it,
can you get it wholesale, repackage it and sell it?)

There is no way yet to track trade in intl services like we do in products...but
I
imagine any place where there is call center management expertise then managing
eBay monitoring is no great challenge. Further, people sitting idle in a call
center
could fill down time by tracking eBay activity.

Get the order first...contract a designer to create the raw data spread sheet,
contact a
service company to create a sample of a study, such as pick a Coach item and
track it
for Coach, then go back to Coach with your sample and a proposal letter asking
for
the order to produce the raw data on their entire line

If anyone pursues this job, ket me know and I will gladly help you draft the
letter to
Coach (or whoever) that properly drives them to accept your offer and pay you
fee in
advance, so this becomes relatively riskless to you.

John

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