How to analyse products to sell online to make the most profit?

As a developer myself, I've set up an e-commerce website in England and hired 2 people to help me package and invoice etc..

In terms of choosing the right and most profitable products to sell what are your suggestions as I don't have much experience on analysing/business/marketing part.

What I do for now is that I check most popular products in amazon/ebay and compare prices to other popular websites and then sell it with a price something in the middle.

I would suggest using google shopping to run a range of comparisons on specific models, I'm not sure if this has an API but it would be worth checking out.

Search for products on google, it will aggragate the sellers, with user ratings and prices. This would be a very basic but I think rather effective model for you to start with.

If you feed all these back into your products database linked to your own buy/sell price you can do some pretty quick calculations around Volume * (Sell - Buy) = "roughly profit" and Order By Descendingly ... Take the top 20% of these (adhoc rule of thumb that works most of the time) and you will have the ones you should focus on.

If you keep this model going for a few months you can start to play with understanding the ratio between a lower sell price and the increased Volume you receive because of it which is how you start to optimise for the "optimum ratio given your specific business".

Let me give you some of my thoughts.

"A business is a cycle, where a products or a services is sold, in an attempt to make profit "

This profit (Money) will be spend somewhere generating a sale for other.

I think, now you must have started visualizing things :)

let's move on.

Now, choosing a product.

First choose few products, which are used daily and their consumption cycle is from a week to a month - hope you understand what I am try to say.

choose services Example: selling a software. (Which can be sold to n numbers of users)

reselling cheap duplicate.

repacking in attractive way and selling.

selling website source code

selling databases

and more...

1. Making things easier for others > eBay > made buying/selling easier
2. making things faster > All booking sites.
3. making things useful for others > groupon
4. making people updated > news websites
5. you can start adding your own. :)

Do comment!!!