Ebay's Product Research Tool - A Game Changer!

 Hi everyone!

 

I can't believe we're so close to BreyerFest & Equilocity! While I'm counting down the remaining days, I thankfully have had a little extra time to myself. Today, I read the latest installment of my new favorite blog, "My Shelf Life", run by a longtime friend. She pointed out a feature on eBay that I was previously unaware of - the "Product Research" tool! If you enable the "Seller Hub" function (free to use as long as you have an eBay account, no sales required on your part), this tool is one of the features that's included. 

It is by far, a more powerful and streamlined way to research up to 3 years of data on any string of text you choose (though I do recommend being somewhat specific at least, or you'll have way too much). The resulting data summary displays a helpful graph showing the trends for your query, sold price range, and average sale price. 

There is also a list below the graph of each listing matching your inquiry, with basic details including a thumbnail photo (which you can click on to enlarge), date of sale, ending price, type of listing (fixed price or auction), how many bids there were if it was an auction, and more. 

One of the most crucial elements of this bottom portion is the little dropdown menu in the Actions column - you can choose to exclude individual listings! This is very helpful, because it bridges the gap between search queries that are too specific and those that are too general to help you get exactly to what you want. 

I'll go through an example to show what the results can look like using this tool!

For this, I decided to use the search term "Breyer Horse Vintage Woodgrain". The system just looks for inclusion of these keywords, so the title of the listing just needs to have the words included, not necessarily in that order. 

At first, I had over 250 results using this search. For brevity, I spent some time removing irrelevant listings (Vintage Club modern woodgrains, Hartlands incorrectly labeled as Breyer, customs, etc.) I also chose to exclude the most common woodgrains (Family Arabians, Fighter, and Five Gaiter) unless they were clearly marked as having stickers or were on lamps. 

Now, I am left with under 150 results, which is more manageable.

 The average sold price across 3 years of my selected data is $163. We'll see there are some bargains that were had on the low end and a few bidding wars on precious rare pieces on the high side. 

I won't bore you with the full list of results, but let's quickly look at the cheapest and most expensive portions, to show off how the bottom section works:

Some good deals on lamps and some mid-tier level of woodgrain rarities (not super common, but also not that hard to find a good deal on if you are patient)

Here we have the expensive end, including high-level rarities in the Belgian, Fury, Morgan, Walking Bulls, & Bull Lamp, as well as some nice Tenite sticker models.

In order to look at a more specific search inquiry, I added "lamp" to the previous search:

I'll show all the results for this one, since there are far fewer:

 

I definitely plan on using this tool both to spot-check model sold listings instead of the old method on ebay (using the regular search bar and selecting completed listings), and possibly taking screenshots periodically to track trends over time on some models (if I remember!) I think this is an excellent resource for buyers, sellers, and data nerds alike!