Sell-It Price Finder - How it works.

The Sell-It Price Finder tool was developed as a research tool to help eBay sellers (and buyers). Over our years of using eBay we found that there was always a few basic piece of information that we wanted to know before listing a product on eBay. We wanted to know what the current market price for a product was and how well it might sell. You can search for that information on a search engine site, like Google, however the results that you find might not really help you price the product. (Search engine sites are great for product information and specifications.)

Where better to find the market price then on the eBay market itself? With so many products listed on eBay, there is a good chance that someone will have listed a similar product. While this doesn't always hold true for that one of a kind, rare antique, you should be able to get an idea of how the market will take to your product. If you are selling a computer or electronic product, there is a good chance you will find many "like" products on eBay.

Analyzing the results of these auctions will give you valuable information for your listing. Some of the searches you might perform would bring back only a couple of results. In such a case, it's fairly easy looking at the results to estimate the product information. However, many searches that I would run would return hundreds or more results. eBay displays these results 50 on a page. Now if you had ten plus pages of results it would be difficult to estimate the product information.

This is why we developed the Sell-It Price Finder tool. This tool will analyze these pages for you and return product information results to help you make informed selling decisions.

The Sell-It Price Finder tool will run your search terms through the eBay completed auction search and return the results to you. The eBay completed item search uses the last 15 days of eBay auctions. The Sell-It Price Finder tool will analyze up to 200 of the most recent results to give you current market results. We have included a sample search below to help explain the results.

The Sell-It Price Finder tool will display the number of auctions matching your search term, up to 200. It will display the average successful price for the resulting auctions. We call this the ASP for short. Non-successful auctions are not counted in this average. The ASP is helpful because it shows you what sale price you might expect to achieve for a similar product. It will display the percentage of auction that ended with a bid. We call this the success rate. The success rate is helpful as it shows you how often you might expect to sell your product. It will display the number of bids per auction for successful auctions. This bids per auctions is helpful by showing you how popular your product might be. If you have a product that averages one bid per auction you might want to start the product at a higher starting price (based on the ASP) as you might only get one bidder for that auction. If your results show 5 or more bids per auction, you might be able to start the listing at a slightly lower price (based on the ASP) to ensure success and to possibly allow a bidding war to start. Starting lower will vary your selling price more. In the long run, if you sell more of the same product, you should see results near the ASP.

While the results we provide are no guarantee of success or any price level, the results can be used to help guide your listing process. I would also recommend clicking on a few of the results to see what those sellers did to achieve their results and most importantly, you need to see what most sellers are charging for shipping. The amount you charge for shipping can affect your selling price.

Below I will analyze a search that I ran today.
The search was PC RAM that I was planning on listing on eBay.
Here are the results from my search.

At the time of this search it returned 200 auctions/results.
This means that there are many similar items being listed on eBay.

The average successful price was $37.23.
This will help you determine your listing price.

The percentage of auctions that ended with a bid was 73.50%.
This indicates that this product is selling well on eBay at that ASP.

The successful auctions averaged about 6 bids per auction.
This shows that the product is fairly popular on Ebay.

Reviewing those results I would make the following listing decisions.

If I had only one or two of the units I would list it this way. I would set a starting price of $37 and a buy it now price of $40. I would run a seven day listing to maximize my chance of getting a bid without paying more fees for a 10 day auction. I am fairly confident that the product will sell the first or second listing. The second listing would be free, if sold, under eBay's one time free relist.

If I had many of these RAM sticks to sell, I would take a different approach. I would set the starting price at $24.99 and not use a buy it now price. By starting it at $24.99 the listing fee would be about half of the fee for starting it at $37. And by starting it lower than the ASP, I would have a better chance of the auction ending successfully as well as stimulating a bidding war and driving the price up. Studies have shown that once a product gets one bid that it is hundreds of times more likely to get additional bids over items without bids. Starting at $24.99 I would expect to achieve a 100% success rate and still achieve prices near the ASP. I would also start the item a couple of times daily and run three day auctions so that I could move the product quicker. eBay allows you to have up to ten of the same auctions open at any given time. Using three day auctions you could run the auction 3 times per day. You could even run ten, 1 day auctions if you wished to, but I personally don't like one day auctions.

Some people might wonder why I don't just run a dutch or fixed price listing for a higher quantity of the product. Well, the main reason is that for a popular product like this, you need to be seen to get bids. If I ran one fixed price listing for 100 pieces at $37, and ran it for a one week duration, I bet it would not achieve the results that the daily auctions would achieve. Bidders like to see what is ending soon. Running 3 auctions per day, every day, you will always have an auction that will be ending soon, so the bidders will always see you. Running the one week auction, you only have that last final day, or hours, where the bidders will see it. Also, I find that most bidding action occurs in the last hour of an auction.

By using the results quickly generated by the Sell-It Price Finder, you can gain valuable insight on product marketing information. This product information will help you making better buying and selling decisions.

Good selling to you!