When I started buying and selling on eBay back in 2004 I sold mostly stuff from around the house or purchased from garage sales in the area. Which is the way most of the books told you to do to get started. But since then my eBay business has evolved somewhat to finding hot items and then finding a wholesaler or a dropshipper to provide those items. This is the method that I use to find what is hot right now on eBay.

Go to eBay’s home page at eBay.com and on the left side where it says “Shop Your Favorite Categories” scroll to the bottom and click on “view all categories”.

Scroll all the way to the bottom of that page and click on “See Item Counts” on the right. It will automatically change to show you all the categories and sub categories with the amount of current listings in them. This will give you information on how popular it is with the sellers. Hold on and I’ll explain later about how to find out how popular it is with the buyers. See the image below with the amount of listings in (xxxx).

Next you will want to go to pulse.eBay.com/ to check the search “Pulse” of popular products.

Once you get there it will tell you the 10 most popular items on all of eBay, but you can narrow the products down by category by looking right above the header where it says “Popular Searches” and it says “Categories”. Click on the drop down menu and choose a category that interests you. Once you go to the next page it lists the 10 most popular searched for products for that category. Click on any of those results and it will take you to a list of currently selling products. To see what has sold in that category just do a “completed listings” search on the Advanced Search page (see below).

To find out what is actually Selling on eBay go to the eBay home page at eBay.com. At the top on the right side of search box is the link to “advanced search”. Click on it to go to the next page.

Enter your keyword (your product you are researching) in the box and check off the “completed listing “box under the “Search Included” category. Next make the default search for “exact words”in the box next to the one you enter the keyword into. There are ways to further narrow down your results, but I suggest you not do that for the first search. Later you can narrow it down if the results are too general to find what you are looking for. You never can tell what other niches you may discover if you leave it as a general search first.

The results will show you whether it sold or not – price in green means sold, price in red means it didn’t sell. It will also tell you how many bids it received and when it sold. Generally speaking you want to see at least a 50% sell rate. From this result page you can also click on any of the listing and see the exact listing they used to sell with.

This is all great information for you to sift through and determine if this is a niche or product you want to pursue. At least it can tell you what is hot on eBay right now.

Once you have found a product you know is selling the next step is to source out were you can buy that product for less and sell for a profit.

A great place I have found where you can get a list of over 8000 pre-approved wholesale products and dropshippers is at SaleHoo.

Visit there site by Clicking Here

After your customer has clicked through from your sales page and made the purchase using Paypal you want to make the delivery of your product as smooth , quick and effortless for them as possible. You can do that by enabling the “Auto Return” feature on your payment page.

Here’s how:

From your Account Overview page click on the “Profile” tab. Then select “more options”. This will take you to the page below:

Find the “Website Payment Preferences” button and click through to the page shown below:

Click on the “Auto Return” On button and fill in the URL of the page that your download / thank you page is located at.

Scroll to the bottom and click “Save”.

This should take you back to the Profile page and tell you “You have successfully saved your preferences”.

That’s all there is to it. Your customers should now be directed straight to your download page after their payment is processed and approved.

If you happen to get to the phase in your internet marketing career where you want to create and sell your own products, one of the skills you will have to master is dealing with Paypal to help you collect money from your customers.

I have put together this quick tutorial showing you how to create a custom page to send to your customers after they click on your “Buy Now” button.

You will need to login to your Paypal account and click on “Account Overview” then click on Profile and then More Options. This will get you to the screenshot below

This will take you to the screenshot below

Now the page above shows a custom page I already made called “MoreOnInternetMarketing”.
But if this is your first time on the page all it will show is the default Paypal payment page only. To make a new custom page you will have to click the “Add” button as shown in the screenshot above. This will take you to the page shown below.

Observe the red numbers beside each item you have to fill in.
1) Is for the name of your custom page. Just put in something that is related to the theme of the page you want to create. For instance, when I created my “MoreOnInternetMarketing” I made it look like my Blog using the “Header Image URL” ( 2) item ). See Image below to see how that page looks.

Notice how the header on the Paypal page matches the header on my site. You can only use an image 750 pixels wide by 90 pixels high so you may have to resize any images you want to use.

The idea is to create a page that makes your customer feel a continuity during the sales process. You don’t want them clicking away if they get uncomfortable by seeing a totally different payment page then the sales page they just came from.

Now you just need to pick the colors for Step 3 and Step 4.

3) Header background color: I used #ffffff (white) for mine I could have put #000000 (black) but I didn’t want to much dark in the header.

4) Header Border Color: I also used the white for this. I don’t have a border around my header image on my blog so I don’t want one on my payment page either.

After filling in those 4 boxes (or just 3 if you don’t want to use a custom header) click “Preview” to see the results.

VERY IMPORTANT TIP: DO NOT click on the “Go To Paypal Account Overview” button as the preview page tells you. I did this the first time I tried and it sent me to my main account home page and I LOST everything I did.

Just hit the back button on your browser and it will take you back to the form you were filling out.Then either edit it to your liking or click “Save” to save your page as is. You can always go back and edit it later if you need to.

I hope this helps you to Create Your Custom Paypal Payment Page. If you have any questions or comments please leave them below in the Comment section. I will check back from time to time and try to answer them if I can.

Look for future posts on How to Create a Paypal button and also How to make your Paypal payment page automatically redirect to your Thank You / Download page after payment.