How to Use eBay Pulse to Hunt Out Hot New Markets

If you are new to eBay or on the hunt for a hot new niche market, eBay Pulse provides an exceptional (and free) solution for seeking out a new money-spinning product that you can sell on eBay for a profit.

What is eBay Pulse?

eBay Pulse is a tool that tells us exactly which products are the most popular on eBay at any given time. It’s great for seeing:

1. What eBay users are buying

2. What eBay users are searching for

3. Who the biggest sellers of that product are (great for eyeing up your competitors!)

When you first get to the eBay Pulse page, this is what you will see:


You should consider the list of the top ten searches on this page as a list of products that you should never attempt to sell. These products, including iPods and Coach handbags, are oversaturated markets that only top eBay sellers with huge budgets can make money selling.
Unless you, too, have a large budget for bulk-buying and marketing these products, you should avoid these products! Instead, you want to use the eBay Pulse category feature to drill down into sub categories and find hot niche products that strike a healthy balance between supply and demand.
These products, believe it or not, will make you a lot more money than the more ‘popular’ products listed on the eBay Pulse homepage. They still have a hungry demand from buyers, while less sellers try to offer these items which makes it a lot easier for you to make profitable and consistent sales.
So how do you unearth these hot niches?

Here’s a quick demonstration:

Start by locating the category drill down on the eBay Pulse home page.



Then click the drop down menu and reveal all the categories on eBay.


From here, you can choose any category that you are interested in or think might make a good niche. For this demonstration, I’ll select Dolls and Bears then click Update.


After I click update, eBay Pulse generates a new list of popular searches. This time, the list shows the most popular searches in the Dolls and Bears category.


We’re getting closer to finding a good niche now, but if we drill down even further, we can hunt out an even ‘deeper’ niche. Generally, the more you drill down, the better because you will have less competitors, but still a good stream of sellers so I’m going to go one category further and select “Reborn dolls” from the drop-down.


Now we’re getting somewhere! As you can see below, there are a number of results for reborn dolls and other keyword variations. This is great news because it means these are among buyers.


So what do you do with this list of potential niches? To determine which is the most viable for you, search eBay and see which keyword has the least search results.
In doing so, you can determine the one that has the least supply, or the least number of competitors selling it, and because we already know from eBay Pulse that demand is high, you can be fairly confident that you’re looking at a hot niche that will sell for good profits.
For example, I searched eBay.com for “reborn baby dolls” and “reborn baby girl”. Look at the difference in search results between the keywords:



As you can see, there are 5,855 searches for “reborn baby dolls” and 1,220 searches for “reborn baby girl”. This tells us that there is less competition on eBay in the reborn baby girl category. Meanwhile, we know from eBay Pulse that there is a similar level of demand.
If I were looking for a new niche, I would take this data and find myself a wholesale supplier of reborn dolls and start listing them on eBay!