posted on April 12, 2001 11:21:09 PM new
Hi! Folks,
Is someone producing software that will help analyze what currently is trendy and the best sellers on eBay? I have not figured out how to do that except by going by keywords in < Completed Items > which is a long and laborious process.
To give you an idea the keyword <plus sizes> yields completed Auctions over 75% a really fast-moving competitive category on eBay. How can I find other categories as lucrative is that?
posted on April 13, 2001 08:13:32 AM new
eBay magazine used to have a chart that really wasn't too helpful, but it gave certain select categories that were supposedly getting hotter and colder.
It probably is too much to expect eBay to help their customers....but there is much data that they collect that could really help sellers with selling strategies and knowing what trends are getting better and what is getting softer.
Such as: % of auction completions (sales) per category, per length of auction, per day of week, time of day, auction categories with increasing/decreasing listings, total listings, moving 20 day average of listings, average selling price per category, moving average of selling price per category (i.e. are prices rising or falling).
I'm sure there are many more tidbits if only they would share them. Instead they treat it as proprietary info for their own use. They've even done away with a running total of eBay items for sale on the home page which was a basic indicator of trends. I guess they thought even that was too much info for their customers.
[ edited by surrrfurtom on Apr 13, 2001 08:17 AM ]
posted on April 13, 2001 11:38:21 AM new
I find this topic fascinating.
You could know within hours what trends were developing. Sam Walton is credited with being the first to quickly use this type of data to move and order stock in a large retail operation. It seems to have worked well for him.
Some sellers, in both new and pre-owned categories, do track their product lines and can post listings for popular items within hours of seeing demand increase.
The break in weather from cold to warm is a easy example of factors that create immediate demand. Of course you have to have inventory available and at a competative price.
And if I ever was so fortunate as to be the first selling a "hot" item I'm not too sure how happy I would be if a few hours later eBay was publishing an alert for sellers to jump into my item.
One item with six eager buyers can go thru the roof but ten items and five buyers can mean starting bid sales or no sales.
I would think that, at the least, eBay is using this data to attract large retailers to their site and for making decisions on partnerships like the Returnbuy deal announced earlier this week.
Why share the information when you can use it for going into the more profitable businesses yourself.
They do release some information occasionally but it is usually connected to the promotion of a extra fee feature, like gallery, and in a form that is of little use.
"Gallery items get more bids or sell at a higher price" is of little value because it might be used by sellers on more expensive and popular items.
A controlled study of identical items offered under identical circumstances with just one variable, such as gallery, would be needed for any valid data to be developed.
A hundred identical items might have good results when offered to a 1000 potential buyers on Sunday night but one item offered to ten buyers at 11:00 AM on a Tuesday might bring the highest price.
I'm not well organized enough nor a big enough operation that the information would make much real difference for me. Forget what happened yesterday, if you told me a hundred plus size dresses in yellow will sell next week I couldn't make a nickle off the information.
And there is always the chance that if ten number crunchers were given the information they would come up with 15 different opinions.
As great a story as it would be to "read" what is happening I think small sellers are, on balance, better off without a full exposuer of the marketplace. Absence of complete data prevents big players from dominating and manipulating markets.
Although eBays failure in several ventures demostrates that even when you know what is happening you can't always make profitable decisions in that category.
I suspect that full disclosure would quickly lead to over supply and falling prices. Good for buyers but very hard on small sellers.
And even the best of sellers are often completely mystified by the variables in demand and final prices within any given time period.
Plus it would take some fun out of the process and there is little enough of that left now.
