

Ask HN: How did you conduct your market research on the cheap? - jqueryin

I've been trying to do some market research on, in my case, internet sales from large online retailers. I'm particularly looking to try and calculate a Total Area Market (TAM) and Serviceable Area Market (SAM). Any searches I've run on google returned either very expensive market research papers on very specific topics or some older publicized research data not applicable to our market.<p>Realistically, how hard should it be to find this information for free? If it's not going to be free, how much would you anticipate spending for such information? How important to investors is this kind of information?<p>If you work for one of the big boys in online retail, perhaps you could shoot me some numbers for your particular company. It'd be greatly helpful.<p>Any and all help on this subject would be greatly appreciated.
======
ig1
Go to your local business library they often have subscription access to
market research libraries.

~~~
jqueryin
Thanks for the advice. I'll call around.

------
revorad
Can you be more specific on what kind of retailers you mean? What are you
trying to do?

~~~
jqueryin
Sure! I'm mainly interested in online retailers that have affiliate programs
(or provide a means for me to make money as a partner/affiliate). I've got to
remain vague on the idea until launch time, but I could sum up our intent with
the retailers as follows:

We have a very large and managed in-house database of affiliate programs. For
given products, we'd be able to do something similar to PriceGrabber, BizRate,
or [insert-shady-service-here] to provide the cheapest pricing options for a
given product.

Mind you, we don't have the intent of creating a shady service along these
lines, but the functionality in regards to monetization remains the same
(direct product links with affiliate codes). For this reason, we're targeting
high ticket items online like electronics and home appliances.

~~~
revorad
I'm building a shopping site too, but not so price-focused. Happy to chat if
you want to email me.

