I want to talk to you today about a product that sells every day and in much higher quantities at different intervals throughout the year.

The product genre under consideration is, of course, school uniform… and this area includes items almost every family with young children needs to buy when a new school year begins.

Uniform and shoes, desktop accessories, satchels and holdalls all fall into the same general category of items parents buy several times a year, depending on how many children of school age they have.

Plus, they often choose the same seller for those items, sometimes for as long as they have still children attending school.

Profits can be enormous and ongoing for successful sellers with an established customer base. Even better, the vast majority of future sales will incur much lower overheads from sellers’ own websites (although first time buyers might be sourced at fee-paying sites like eBay and Amazon).

By now you’re probably wondering why I’m revealing this business today, given that children are about to return to school after the summer break.

It may be true enough that there is not enough time to plan a business selling school uniforms and accessories for the coming autumn term.

But this is also a wonderful time to study other people selling similar products on eBay and Amazon, using what you find to plan your own successful business doing the same when another school term begins in January.

You need to know up front that this is a labour intensive product area, with low unit profits per sale. That’s very good news – for savvy sellers – because hard work restricts incoming sellers who fail to realise the high cumulative profits established sellers earn each day.

Another major benefit: all that work, easy though it is, involving packing and addressing hundreds of orders each day, might not suit a one person business… but could be perfect for a family concern.

Check out the following sites to begin studying those already selling school uniform and accessories…

#1 – eBay

Do an Advanced Search on eBay to see what items are currently attracting heavy orders for other sellers.

Click on ‘Advanced’ in the top right of eBay’s home page and in the top left of the next page click on ‘Find Items’.

Describe the product you are researching in the search box top of the page. Then tick ‘Sold listings’ on the same page and click to search.

On the right side of the following page, at ‘Sort’, choose ‘End Date: Recent First’ (because we want to know what items of school clothing and related products are selling right now).

Then, on the left side of the next page you’ll see various eBay listing categories for the type of products you are considering.

Click on any, such as ‘Clothes, Shoes & Accessories > Kids’ Clothes, Shoes & Accs’ and you’ll be taken to items with green-coloured prices indicating items sold in the last few days.

For whatever reason, I found no recent sales for ‘school uniform’ but a long list of recent sales for ‘school’.

School is the better search term, however, and reveals sales of all items of school clothing, not just outer uniform, as well as desk accessories and other essential back to school products. So ‘school’ it is!

Now study products and prices, whether delivery is charged for and how many sales have ensued for a specific product listing.

You’ll find some products have sold hundreds of times and others very few. Depending on how long an item has been listed, you will identify products most likely to generate regular sales for you.

On the left side of the first page returned from your advanced search you will see ‘Matching eBay Shops’. These are eBay shop sellers stocking the largest number of relevant items, in our case back to school products.

Study shop owners with one thousand or more school products listed and you have a source of ready-made product and marketing ideas for your own proposed new product range.

Click on the link to any of those shops and next page you’ll see the range of products on offer. Click on a product there and you’ll be taken through to its eBay listing.

Close to centre top on the following page, alongside ‘Quantity’, you’ll see a number coloured red revealing the number of sales for the product. Click on that number and you will see when sales were made and how many were for multiple products.

And that is how I spotted many different products selling upwards of thirty items each day and generating good cumulative profits. So even if a seller makes just two pounds pure profit per sale, that adds up to sixty or more pounds pure profit each day… and that’s just for one product in their sometimes extensive inventory.

#2 – Goofbid

I find Goofbid a much better research tool than eBay for product searches, given that Goofbid reveals sales figures and prices on one page while eBay requires you to study several pages for the same information.

By far the biggest benefit of Goofbid, however, is that images are shown alongside a long list of different products and their sales numbers, all on the same page.

And that made it very easy for me to spot several identical images for one item of school uniform priced several pounds apart.

Images and titles for the same item from several sellers obviously came from the manufacturer’s promotional materials and each listing with that image might have taken just minutes to create.

Strangely, one item was priced £3.10 and sold 23 times in the last month, while another identical item priced £5.99 had sold 26 times. Had sellers created their own images and titles and maybe added a bonus item to the mix, I’m quite sure their own sales for the same product would have been much higher.

So I recommend you study shop owners at eBay and products at Goofbid.

How easy was that? And how much more attractive back to school products sound when you consider:

– The standard school uniform typically comprises several pieces: jumper or cardigan, for example, skirt or trousers, shirt or blouse, underwear, shoes and socks, outer jacket and raincoat, cap or hat. In turn, this makes every parent a potential buyer for several different items from their own preferred eBay sellers.

– Many families have children spaced just a few years apart and several children at school together. So some parents buy uniforms for two or more children at the same time.

– Parents are pushed for time during the summer holidays when children are not only physically demanding but a big drain on time and energy too. And that’s why many parents buy uniforms and school accessories online, rather than drag a bunch of kids to the high street to shop.

– Few high street shops stocking school uniforms offer more than one or two basic designs and because they usually have high rent and staffing and other costly overheads, you’ll usually find prices higher on the high street than on sites like eBay and Amazon.

So there you have it: a wide range of products you can research today and have up and running ready for school recommencing after the Christmas break.

To help you, I have a special back to school bonus report planned for my new project due out a few weeks from now.

This new project has a 100% money back guarantee, so you stand to lose nothing and perhaps earn a good deal selling back to school and other seasonal products!

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