5. Review: Market Research Wizard

Market Research Wizard 1.41
WorldWide Brands
Windows computer application, $97
www.wilsonweb.comafd/wwb_wizard.htm

How can you determine which is the best products for you to sell? Most research software programs focus on keywords. Only a few software programs look at tangible products in particular. One of the best is the Market Research Wizard from WorldWide Brands. They developed this tool since they constantly work with suppliers and online merchants for their Drop Ship Source Directory.

Back to the Market Research Wizard. To operate the program, you put in a category, product name, and/or a brand name. I selected a product name: "Zoo Tycoon," but didn't include the brand name "Microsoft" since that might give me too broad a search.

The program helps you determine several factors, each accessed with a tab on the Wizard screen.

Demand is determined by how many Internet searches there are for your products, using a wide variety of search terms. If no one is looking, then it's not likely you'll sell many. If many are looking, then this could be a winner. In terms of demand, there were 24,013 recent Internet searches for "Zoo Tycoon," using 100 variations of the search terms. The top variations are listed, with the number of searches for each.

Competition is assessed by how many people are selling using your keywords. The program searches Yahoo!, eBay, and Google to see the number products, stores, and webpages using "Zoo Tycoon." There are 376 products in Yahoo! Stores (used here as a relative benchmark to determine competition). On eBay there are currently 172 auctions or stores using my keyword and 109 products listed using my keyword. 2,970,000 pages were found on Google using this keyword.

Advertising search found for my keyword 3 Google ads, 3 FindWhat (now Miva) ads, and 40 Overture (now Yahoo! Search Marketing) ads. The search lists the URLs of each competitor and shows the text of each ad.

Resources looks up suppliers for the product in WorldWide Brands' (1) Light Bulk Wholesale Directory or (2) Drop Ship Source Directory, so long as you have a membership. In my case, since suppliers are listed by product type and brand name, not specific product name, I would need to research under "games" to find a supplier.

Analysis summarizes the results and combines factors of demand, competition, and advertising with an algorithm to tell you what probability of success you would have selling the product, in this case, the Zoo Tycoon computer game. In my case on this particular day, the Analysis percent is 83%, which shows up in the "best probability" range.

View Searches allows you to organize the various searches you have completed and delete the ones that are no longer relevant.

Summarize takes the data from all your searches so far and summarizes them for printing or download to an Excel spreadsheet. . This puts on in one place the distillation of your research so far, sorted by the analysis percent.

Auction Pricing shows the auctions listed on eBay that are closest to ending for "Zoo Tycoon." It shows current price or bid for each auction.

It is a very impressive tool, with quick access to a great deal of data, plus an "analysis percent" which gives you a rough estimate of how well a product or category of products is likely to do. What it doesn't consider is price, wholesale or drop-ship price, and margin, though it does give you access to that data if you have a membership in one of the WorldWide Brands directories. Nor does it give you the current pricing of Google AdWords or Yahoo! Search Marketing keywords.

I found that Market Research Wizard installed easily on my Windows XP computer, ran fast searches via my DSL connection, and provided very helpful data. The interface doesn't have its terms quite up-to-date, however. "Overture" is now called "Yahoo! Search Marketing" and "FindWhat" is now called "Miva." But the data looks up-to-date.

Is it worth $97. Oh, yes, if you're at all serious about selling tangible products online. It is a research tool that can save you lots of both time and heartache. Recommended!

For more information, see the product description online.