You're planning to sell on eBay, but want to know if your business is going to boom online. You wonder if there's anyone on the market for the stuff that you are offering to sell. So, you go ahead and research about it, but don't know where to begin.

Not to worry! Here's a guide that can help you out.

What are buyers searching for?

First off, you'll want to know what buyers are looking for when they visit the site. This would help you gauge if there is indeed a high level of demand on the stuff that you are planning to sell. If you haven't decided what to sell yet, this may also be able to help you find out what you would like to sell.

eBay has this really great part of their site called eBay Pulse . It's a site that shows you a daily snapshot of the top searches on the site. You can either look into it and see the top searches for the whole site or even see top searches for each category. This may give you a good idea of what buyers are looking for at the site and if there is indeed a market for the items you are wanting to sell.

Another way to learn what buyers are looking for is to go through eBay's Want It Now site. This site lets buyers post ads about items that they want to buy. You can do a search to see if the item you are planning to sell comes up a lot on the Want It Now ads or just browse through each category to check out the Want It Now ads.

What are the hot selling items?

Another way to research about what items to sell or how feasible it is to sell your item at eBay is to check our what the hot selling items are at eBay.

If you click on the Buy link at the top of most eBay pages and click on the Popular Products link right at the bottom of the page, it will show you to most popular selling products at eBay, for select categories. It's updated frequently, so you'll want to check it out every so often to find out the top items being sold.

If the item you are selling doesn't fall in to the categories listed in the Popular Products page, you can also check the Hot Items report on eBay's Seller Central page. This will which categories carry out the largest amounts of sales and is updated every month. You can always check on it by clicking the Hot Items link on the left side of the Seller Central page. It's a file that can be downloaded and is written in PDF, so you may want to download a PDF reader like Adobe Acrobat to be able to read it.

Knowing your buyers

A great way to be able to decide on what to sell or how to sell is to know a little bit more about your market. Luckily eBay also has a cool document on the Seller Central page that has a report on buyer behavior. It's another PDF file that shows you how many buyers come at the site, how long to stay, what they do on the site, what parts of the site they visit, their demographics and why they shop on the site. It's a report done over the past year with results from site statistics as well as surveys done on visitors on the site. You can just click on this link to download the report or you can just go to Seller Central and click on Advanced Selling on the left side of the page and click on the link at the bottom under Buyer Behavior Report.

Scoping out the competition

Once you've already found out what you want to sell or have decided to take the plunge and start your mini business at eBay, you'd probably want to know your competition.

A simple search on eBay, may let you be able to find out more about the items being sold at the site, but a great tool to use is the Advanced Search page that will let you do a search for items that have been sold and at what price they were sold. You can just click on the Advanced Search link at the upper right hand corner of most eBay pages and on this page, you can just put a check mark on the option 'Completed listings only'

This will let you search for items similar to your item and let you see others that have sold it, know how they listed it and at what price they were able to sell it for. You'll also be able to be familiar with your competitors as well and check out how you can offer your product better to your online buyers.

Other useful pages

The Seller Central page if one of the best places to start out for more information about selling at eBay. You can browse through this site to get more tips when you're starting to sell or have already been selling.

Another part of the eBay site is the Community section. You can just click on the Community link at the top of eBay pages and check our eBay's own online community of buyers and sellers, posting on the Discussion boards. A lot of members to offer tons of great help, and you can always ask for advice about the listing that you have posted or even selling tops for more experienced sellers.

Now that you've got a headstart by researching, it's up to you to get the ball rolling and take the dip in to the biggest online marketplace. It's always real fun selling and a great experience as well, you'll never know, you might just be the next great big online entrepreneur!

- meeyaw