Imagine if you could tap into the minds of buyers and discover what they want, but have been unable to find on eBay. Well, you can do exactly that with the ?Want It Now' sub-section of eBay. Any eBay member can list a request in ?Want it Now' for free, to let others know about an item or items they're looking for. There's a huge opportunity in this field that has been largely overlooked.



So how can you profit from this? It's simple. Look for items that appear frequently, and fulfill the need.

I'll give you an example. On one occasion I noticed that users of eBay were looking for a particular book, a novel that was out of print in the USA. I looked on Amazon and other online book sellers, but no one had the book, which is obviously why so many people had turned to eBay. However, on further investigation I found an abundance of copies available on Amazon.co.uk, the UK specific site, and since I have relatives in that country, it was easy to have them order a box of the books, which I then resold in the USA for a huge markup, because they were in such demand! People were clamoring for this book, which I'd never even heard of. My guess is that it had been featured on a national TV or radio show here in the States, which prompted the sudden interest in buyers. Incidentally, as a side note, looking out for future trends is yet another way to profit from eBay. For example, if you know the release date of a movie that has a lot of hype, you can create an information product around that movie, timed to be available even before the movie comes out.

My wife, Luci, did that with ?The DaVinci Code' movie. Knowing how popular the book had been, when she heard that the movie was coming out, she put together a 20 page guide entitled '21 DaVinci Code Myths & Facts Exposed - At last, discover the secrets and truth about Dan Brown's book and movie of Leonardo Da Vinci'. Notice how the title maximizes the use of keywords by the way ? very smart. She sold that little book for $8 as a digital download, and it's still selling today, more than a year after the movie was released! Anyway, that was a side story that I

thought you might appreciate, now let's get back to our main focus of profiting from the ?want it now' area of eBay. You should know that the fact that someone has posted a request in the ?want it now' area of eBay means they haven't been able to find what they're looking for on the main eBay website. If you're one step ahead you'll realize that to go through thousands of these posts manually is a heck of a job. It would take days to do that, and that's not my idea of fun, so I was delighted to come across a little software utility that takes all the pain out of the process. It's called ?Auction Yen' and it costs $47. I recommend that you invest in this software because it lets you tap into this little known area of eBay in a super easy way.

Currently, you can use Auction Yen to search the ?want it now' section of the USA, UK, Canada and Australia eBay sites. The way it works is it looks for identical keywords that appear in numerous posts. The more posts it finds with identical keywords the better, because that indicates a lot of demand. You can search either by category (it'll search an entire category) or you can search for specific keywords to see if there's a demand. If you're open to any ideas the first approach is better, whereas if you're looking for buyers of a specific product, the second option to set a specific keyword would work better for you.

If this sounds complicated, rest assured it's not. It's VERY easy to use ? choose a website, choose whether you want to search an entire category or by keyword, and press the ?yenalyze' button.

To show you that the experience I mentioned earlier was not a coincidence or ?lucky break,' in preparing this article I just searched again in the books category to see what would come up in Auction Yen. I found a book that 6 people were looking for called ?In the Boss's Bed!' ?would expect, there were no listings for

apparently an in-demand romance novel. As you would expect, there were no listings for this book on any of the eBay auction sites, but a quick search on Amazon.co.uk revealed that it's available from multiple sellers for less than $1. What's more, the sequel, ?Back in the Boss's Bed' was also available at a similar price. I'm not making this stuff up, honest!

I reckon you could make six sales of both of those books (and there's probably even more titles) and you'd make a healthy profit ? oh, and simply pass on the shipping and handling cost, everyone expects to pay that, so don't worry about that aspect of the sale.

The other smart thing to do would be to buy more of the books at the same time and list them on eBay. Think about that. A lot of people don't know that ?Want It Now' even exists. You can be sure that there are plenty more buyers for the book, who are just waiting for it to appear on the main eBay auction site of the country where you live.