If youve a savvy businessperson, the chances are youve already taken a look at your competitors auctions. What you might not have realised is just how much you might learn if you understand what youre looking for.

To start with, do not bother looking at listings that havent ended yet you do not know whats going to happen with them. Instead, make use of the advanced search page to search for listings that sold. Just go to the advanced search page, type in the keywords that you understand will find your competitors items, tick Completed listings only and set the minimum number of bids to 1. Set it to sort by Price: highest first.

This will show you auctions competing with yours that have recently finished, starting with the ones that sold for the most (ignore any with prices in red they didnt sell). Go through and take a look, paying special attention to the following points:

Titles. What information do the top sellers of your item put in their titles, and what do they leave out? If your titles are very different to theirs, it might be measure for a rethink.

Descriptions. You will most likely notice that the highest sellers havent just copied writing from the companys web page or an Amazon.com review theyve gone to the trouble of writing a little about the merchandise , and about themselves. Learn from their example.

Pictures. I can almost guarantee you that the listing will have very nice pictures not catalogue quality, but dazzling enough to see what youre grasping . With items of any significant cost, you will probably find more than one photo from different angles.

Style. Is it written conversationally, or in terse businesslike language? The way you should write entirely depends on what the market seems to like and the sell seems to like what the top sellers wrote.

Time. Its pretty easy to ignore this as a factor without meaning to, but pay attention to when the top selling items auctions began and ended. This might give you a few clues about the best to catch buyers who will bid highly on your item, and then you may schedule your items accordingly.

Price. If your competitors are selling using Buy it Now, you can see what the maximum is that theyve managed to sell for recently, and set your own Buy it Now price slightly below that.

Shipping. Look around to see the sweet spot for shipping. If you may figure out a certain way to get your shipping costs lower than the highest sellers, then this is a sizeably effective opportunity to differentiate yourself in the sell .

Once you see what works, you may initial to emulate your competitors of course you can not just copy them completely, but you can structure your auction similarly and build sure it includes the same understanding.

If you want your items to do even better, then start stocking the items in your category that are the most in-demand. Well show you how to tell whats selling and whats not in our next electronic mail .