Atari 5200 and Atari 7800 Video Game Prices

We've added two more consoles and all their games to our website, Atari 5200 and Atari 7800.

Atari 5200 Games & Prices

We added 80 Atari 5200 games to our database this morning. Only Bounty Bob Strikes Back is listed today. By tomorrow morning more than forty or fifty 5200 games will be on the website and more will show up as we find prices for them.

Atari 7800 Games & Prices

VGPC now has 42 Atari 7800 games with a price, plus about 30 more games that we are waiting to find prices for before adding them to the website.

Both Atari 5200 and Atari 7800 can be found in the menu on the left under the "more systems" category.

Ebay Sales Highest on Sunday, Lowest on Wednesday

As long as eBay has been around people have claimed that certain days are the best day of the week to sell because the prices are the highest. Common thoughts are, "Monday is the best day because people come back to work and use their fast internet to bid on stuff", or "Friday is the worst because people are going out for the weekend instead of bidding".

Is there a best day of the week to buy or sell a video games on eBay?

There are two factors in deciding what day of the week to sell an item: how likely is it to sell and what price will I get?

More Games Sell on Sunday Than Any Other Day

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The chart above shows the average number of games sold every day of the week. Sunday has the most video games sold with 11,438. Followed in a distant second by Monday, which had 8,818 sales on average.

The lowest day of the week was Wednesday with 7,639 transactions on average. This is nearly a 50% difference from Wednesday to Sunday.

This would cause us to believe that Sunday is the busiest day of the week in eBay's video game section. The more buyers there are online the more sales there will be. This is backed up by the fact that there are more fixed price listings that close on Sunday too. These listings aren't dependent on the ending time, but with all else being equal will end more often when more people are shopping.

Is This Difference Statistically Significant?

This difference in sales could be random variation and not a real difference based on the day of the week. A chi-square test can tell us how confident we can be that the difference is significant.

The test tells us we are 99.99% sure that Sunday has the most sales.

Prices Don't Change During The Week

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The chart above shows the average video game price on eBay by day of the week. Our data shows that Wednesday has the highest average price and Sunday has the lowest. But the difference is very small, only 7% difference between the two ($18.52 on Wednesday and $17.26 on Sunday).

Sales Price Variation is NOT Statistically Significant

Running the same chi-square test shows us that the difference in the prices is not statistically significant.
This means if we ran this test again in a few months with new data we could get completely different results.

What Does this Mean for Buyers and Sellers?

eBay Sellers
Auctions Should End on Sunday - more users will see the listing which means there is a better chance it will sell
Don't Worry Much About Ending Day - Sunday might have more shoppers but the ending price of the video game auction will probably be the same no matter what day it ends. So don't worry about the day of the week too much.

eBay Buyers
No Special Deals on Friday or Saturday - your not not going to get better deals on certain days of the week because prices are generally the same.
Shop Fixed Price Items on Wednesday - If someone starts a fixed price listing with a really good price, you have a better chance of spotting it first on Wednesday because there are fewer shoppers to spot it before you.

This article is based on ebay sales data from May 1st 2009 to August 31st 2009 gathered by VideoGamePriceCharts.com. It contains 1,071,279 individual transactions and net sales of $19,089,853.

Ebay Game Sales Increase 30% in December

Like most retailers, eBay sees a big increase in traffic and sales during the holiday season, which traditionally starts after Thanksgiving. How many more items does eBay sell though? We used our price data for video games on eBay to find out for sure.

Number of Sales on eBay per Day Before and After Thanksgiving

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The chart above shows the number of completed video games transactions on eBay from November 8th to December 14th 2009. The red line in the middle is Thanksgiving Day.

Before Thanksgiving, the number of transactions follows a weekday trend with busy Sundays and slow Fridays but the average is fairly steady.

Sales quickly jump after November 26th and consistently stay above the pre-holiday average.

eBay Sales Chart With Average Lines
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This chart is the same as the top chart but adds two lines showing the average number of games sold on eBay before and after Thanksgiving.

Before Thanksgiving, an average of 11,400 games sold every day. Afterwards, there were an average of 14,900 games sold per day. 30% more games sell every day on eBay after Thanksgiving than before.

Note: Due to a server outage on December 3rd we didn't collect price data on every transaction that day so the actual number of sales that day is higher than the 9,000 we show in the charts.

Hard Drive Failure. Temporary Outage

We had a hard drive failure on one of our servers last night. We have backups and are working to restore all of our data. VGPC might be down intermittently for the next several hours. Thanks for your cooperation and sorry for any inconvenience.