Yes, I'm looking to start my own BANS site, now I need your help... HOW exactly do you choose your BANS niches? I am trying to find one that is popular and yet at the same time has low costs (makes it easier to gain an ACRU.) Although the % commission will not be strong, oh well. So how do you choose your niches?
The first thing I did when I started setting up eBay stores was to make a store for each of my hobbies. If you know about a topic, then you'll know what's hot, and what products to push. Plus you can actually have fun setting up the store if it's about a product/hobby that you're interested in. Once you've done that, think about the weird or stupid things you're friends are into and make sites for people like them. Don't waste too much time with iPods, plasma TVs, and everything else that is massively over saturated.
I could'nt agree more. and as far as bans goes add pc's, travel and pets to the list! other things you can think about are commercial items, ie what do you use at work, tools, equipment etc. when you find a niche really home in on it. don't go with too broad a niche. for example don't pick outdoor garden equipment, too broad, pick just hedge trimmers. not a good example perhaps but just to illustrate the point. good luck.
second to Kerosene, working on your hobby niche is a fun start. one good point on this niche, you know your subject very well. you know what hot what not. so for a start I strongly suggest work on your hobby. you wont regret. good luck.
I think the toughest part next to the niche discovery is actually finding something that exists in large enough quantities on ebay. Obviously, you cannot create a BANS store on a niche so narrow, that 1-5 items show up on your site every day.
Hot items, higher priced items, and seasonal items. I narrow each site down to a very small niche. There needs to be at least about 500 items being auctioned to make it work out.. for me. Selecting the niche is an important part, but only part. Go to your niche and copy of few of the title then do a Google search on them to see the activity.
Couple of notes: Most important, when you do find a niche, don't post it anywhere. Don't post a link to "check out my new bans store". You will wind up with a thousand copycats. Get a head start. Along the lines of my above point, you can add "powered by build a niche store" to your niche keyword and search and see if other sites are targeting it, and build something better. Don't be afraid of competitive terms, if you know your SEM you can do well. I go after some laser targeted long tails of some competitive terms and do ok.
People always say to choose tight niches with BANS but I've had the most success so far with a rather wide niche... It seems that most of the search traffic I get to my BANS store is from long tail searches ... finding items that were listed in the eBay listings so ... In that case it doesn't really matter that much whether you are honing in on something really specific or not because they are finding the store anyway and ... Well this wide niche store has over 100 pages and so that's more possibilities...