market

According to comScore, retail e-commerce sales growth slows to 6 percent in Q3 2008 versus last year and to 11 percent in the jewelry and watches segment, which was one of the weakest in the United States online retail market.

How exactly can I research if there is a market for a particular jewelry design idea?

original photo by Nic McPhee

I received quite few emails about my previous post asking the same question; so, I figured out that probably a lot of jewelry designers in some way do face the same problem.

It sounds like a good idea to check if a product that you are about to create does have a market and it may be sold in a reasonable period of time for a profit. Doesn’t it? But how?

The good news is that it’s so much easier nowadays to do the market research. You may have results in a matter of hours while without internet you’d wait months. As I mentioned already, poll is a good way to find out what majority of your customers might think about an idea or a product. That is easy if you have a lot of visitors at your jewelry web store and what if you don’t?

terapeak.com

There are several tools that may help you to analyze what people buy. One of the best is the web application called Terapeak that will help you to see what sellers list at Ebay and what happens with those listings.

For example if you will to got to Terapeak’s free selling report and search for a "jasper bracelet", you will see that there were 748 of them listed in last 7 days (in time of writing this article), 49.33% of them have been sold for an average price of $12.22.

You can further filter the data by category and price, take a look on particular items and get a pretty good understanding on how your idea or product matches with what people buy.

Free version has limited functionality and you have only up to 14 days of listings’ history and you will not be able to research on top sellers and see the trends, but it’s already gives you a lot of data to think about and a great analysis tool.

Deciding on your next product you must not guess.

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