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Pricing for Dummies

How to Find What Your Item’s Worth

FEATURED COMMENTARY

By Chris Malta
Home EBiz Product Sourcing Expert

Setting prices on eBay can sometimes feel like shooting while blindfolded. As convenient as it would be, no one has put together a convenient little guide you can grab to find the average price for Item X. Trying to assemble the seemingly unlimited categories and products being sold on eBay, along with the prices they typically go for, into one handy compilation would be a task that could make anyone throw their hands up in despair.

EBay Pricing Made Easy
Well, almost anyone… but author Julia Wilkinson (www.YardsalersEBayers.com) thought she was up to the challenge. And she’s spent the last year compiling all that information into one useful, time-saving aid, The EBay Price Guide. This paperback volume can be a tremendous resource, especially if you’re just getting started on eBay and have no idea what to expect, in terms of pricing. It provides a terrific overview—just flip through the pages and see what’s selling and for how much.

The Highlights
While not entirely exhaustive (publishers actually insisted on cutting it down by two thirds), the book contains many pertinent facts and figures:
• It covers eBay’s thirty-some top categories in the order they appear on the site and discusses standout auctions and relevant trending info.
• It lists the most popular subcategories and the fifteen high and fifteen average prices within those subcategories.
• It includes compilations of fun, interesting data, such as the top keywords from A-Z, twenty-five things you can’t sell on eBay, and the fifty top eBayers with the most feedback.
• It compares eBay prices to retail, so you can see what kind of bargains people are really getting. Wilkinson discloses, “I found a rule of thumb that people often get a bargain of about a third to half off of what they would expect to pay retail.”

Gauging Your Choices
The price guide is a great research supplement. The data was gleaned primarily from Hammertap.com’s DeepAnalysis research tool, using the data in the auction title and the final prices. You don’t get the product specifics, such as year and condition, so once you find your specific niche, you’ll want to do more extensive fact-finding with a tool like Terapeak.com or mpire.com. But the book can quickly put your product ideas into perspective and shave a lot of time off the top of the research process.

Whether you’re looking to buy or sell, The EBay Price Guide is a great starting point. You can keep it on your desk as a quick reference, rather than having to go sort through a lot of data online, which can be very time-consuming. Wilkinson explains, “When you’re trying to decide what you’re going to sell on eBay, you’re looking for initial numbers… so you can go into this guide and come up with a really quick idea of whether or not it’s worth doing.” Not only can you check out the products you’re considering, but you might also get ideas for products you hadn’t even thought about.