Ebay market value prices are a good strategy for sellers to analyse.
A common strategy for gemstone sellers is to use Ebay market value prices to help set their prices. It’s problematic, but it’s common. It’s free and you can do it from your chair. I’ll try to help:
Ebay market value prices give you real world data.
First, use realized prices only, and mostly not even those. Near the top right corner of your screen, next to the “search” button there’s a link called “advanced”. Start there. Any seller can ASK anything they want and if you are just looking at the current listings, you’ve got nothing.
Go to advanced, and enter whatever description you want.
Check the box for “Sold items”. This should automatically also check the box for “completed items”.
Ignore the rest, for now, and click the “Search” button.
These are the items that sold in the last 90 days or so. By “sold”, it means the auction came to a conclusion with someone agreeing to buy. You’re not done. This is where the hunt gets interesting. One of the problems on ebay is that fakes and misrepresentations are rampant. Descriptions are based purely on seller written descriptions which are not, unfortunately, particularly reliable. Even the photos can be an issue. Use careful judgement. You need to take the descriptions with a HUGE grain of salt and if it looks fishy, move along. If your results list has fewer than about 10 ads or more than a few hundred, modify your description. I do an example. For my example, I’m looking comps on a cushion cut natural red spinel, 4.52carats. Instead of just saying “Spinel”, which produced 12,000 results, say “Red Spinel” or “Natural Red Spinel cushion”.
That search for “Natural Red Spinel cushion” dropped the results to 639 stones. That’s still too many but it’s possible to take a look at that point.
Peruse the list. You should already have a feel for what to expect before you get here. A 33 carat Spinel is NOT going to be natural, for example. Not only is that going to be fake, write off everything else from that seller as well. In the gemstone business there are many very large sellers out of Thailand. You can tell by the 70,000 feedback but you’ll also learn to recognize their photography and diction. My example stone should be going to be in the $10,000 range. Not $44. What do you get when you add a drop of manure to a barrel of wine? A barrel of manure. Blackball the seller and move on.
The next thing to look for is “or best offer” in the ad. Even though we’re looking at completed auctions, they won’t tell you what the offer was. An item listed for $15,000 or best offer, where the best offer accepted is $200, still shows that $15,000 price. You can’t use it, even if it looks like a great example. You just don’t have a price.
Next, look at the seller. Ignore any that have fewer than 10 feedback. This may kick out some legitimate sellers but it also kicks out the most obvious amateurs who have the least reliable descriptions. Feedbacks are almost always baloney. Buyers routinely don’t know and don’t want to find out. It’s an odd thing. Paying an appraiser to tell you that you just spent hundreds or thousands of dollars on a fake is adding insult to injury.
I didn’t run down the whole list but I looked at the first 100 or so. Not one passed. I’ve already literally wiped out every single stone for use as comps.
Normally, that would be enough to stop the search for Ebay market value prices. It’s time to find a different strategy. This doesn’t always happen. A similar hunt for “GIA polariscope” has 19 results. About half of them were bundled with a refractometer and a few more were just related items, like a manual but that left 8 that were at least superficially credible. Prices ranged from $80 to $260. From that you can really look at every ad. Looking back, those “best offer” ones were negotiated from about $200. We don’t know the final price but it was presumably less than that. They’re not all the same model and you can tell from the picture which one it is. Some models are cheaper than others. Who knew? We still don’t know if the sellers were legit, or if the buyers actually paid, but we’ve got a pretty good focus on the price. $80-$150. That’s about as close as you can get on Ebay market value prices comps.