In my last article, I discussed a new program, invented by an eBayer to write effective eBay auction titles (http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abu/y205/m08/abu0148/s04). This made me think further on the topic. What search terms do potential buyers actually enter? What titles could I give my auctions to make them reach a wider audience? Is there anything in the title that could adversely affect the ending price? What are people actually looking for? This led me to "SellerPower," a new subscription service run by Sellathon.

It is not cheap ($49 for 3 months or $149 for one year). If you are a serious seller with lots of high-priced listings (with a huge monthly eBay bill to go with it), you may consider SellerPower a worthy investment that will save you lots of money in the long term. But its high price means many low-volume eBayers will find the service a little out of their budget. Consignment sellers will find SellerPower valuable when advising customers on the popularity of items.

Sellathon CEO Wayne Yeager gave me an inside look at SellerPower. The SellerPower database is comprised from search terms gathered by Sellathon's free trial members of its ViewTracker tool. There are a very large number of these users, so the information gives a broad overview of what people are searching for on eBay.

As any fan or collectibles seller will tell you, the term "Star Wars" covers a multitude of areas. As well as the movies, you have the books, the posters, clothes, action figures....the list goes on forever. If someone wanted you to sell their Star Wars collection, wouldn't you like to know what is most in demand? Wouldn't you like to know the exact search terms potential buyers are using?

Using SellerPower, you would find out that out of 835,000 Star Wars-related queries in the last 90 days, the search term most used was "star wars lego" (172,000 queries). At the bottom of the list are "star wars micromachine" at 2000 search queries.

Of course, before you decide to start selling Star Wars legos first and leave the micromachines until later, I recommend a trip to eBay.com to do a completed-item search to confirm your SellerPower research, so you can see what the sell-through rate and average selling prices are of the items you are researching.

Where SellerPower really becomes worth the money is seeing what words to put in the auction title to ensure maximum exposure. For example, the term "star wars action figure" picked up 7,800 search queries in the last 90 days, but the term "vintage star wars action figure" picked up 8,300 search queries. So by adding one more word, you would have another 500 hits to your auction listing. Without that word, those 500 people may not see your auction.

You have two options for searching the SellerPower database: you can search the past 90 days, or you can go back through the past year. You can save your searches under your username for later reference.

The SellerPower website http://www.sellerpower.com

A tutorial on how to use SellerPower http://www.sellerpower.com/tutorial.html