29 Jan
2006
29 Jan
'06
4:28 p.m.
In article <20060129211255.10748.qmail at web51613.mail.yahoo.com>,
steve <gkicomputers at yahoo.com> writes:
a ebay pricing guide would be useful, and it needs to
just be called just that, the price it sells on ebay,
whether people think it is too high or too low or
doesn't represent the true value shouldn't come in to
the equation. Although, someone would have to take
into account the condition and accesories sold with
the computer.
If it sold for $X on ebay, then it was worth $X to someone. That's
all a price is -- what people are willing to pay. If people aren't
willing to pay $X then it won't sell for $X on ebay. Sometimes the
'auction fever' aspect of ebay comes into play, but the same would be
true if there were enough collectors nationwide that you would have
competition for items in local markets. The net has a way of
aggregating local small markets into a single worldwide market. That
has a tendency to eliminate the local inefficiencies in markets and
that tends to make finding the "good deals" harder.
Today I was wondering if you couldn't build up a historical price
database for ebay (they purge their price data after a month or so, it
seems) by making searches for particular items that email you, but
only for *closed* items. Thus you get the information about the items
that closed emailed to you in a consistent format. With enough
accumulated data you should be able to start forming a price guide for
items. The rarer the item the longer you'd have to gather data before
being able to come up with enough examples to form a price guide.
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