Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Show New Condition Prices on Charts

After the recent user survey, we promised to add a line to our price charts showing items in new condition.  Today we fulfilled that promise.  Here's an example for Chrono Trigger DS:


The blue line shows used prices.  The red line shows new prices.  For most games, new price data goes back to about August 2010.  We have older data for a few popular titles.  When you first load a game page, new prices are hidden on the chart.  To display them, click the New label in the upper right corner of the chart (in the legend).  For many games, the new prices are so much higher than the used prices, that showing them on the same chart makes it hard to see meaningful trends in the used prices.

With this change, we also switched from Google's Flash charts to Highcharts JavaScript charting.  The new charting component provides the following benefits:

  • almost instant chart loading
  • charts should work on iPad and Android tablets
  • makes it possible to add many cool features down the road
We don't have a tablet for testing, so please let us know in the comments if the charts don't work on your tablet (my Android tablet recently careened off the front seat cracking the glass).  Because the new charting component was originally designed for showing stock price charts, it supports some great features.  At some point, we might display sales volumes or candlestick charts.  Those changes aren't yet on our roadmap, so let us know in the comments if that's something you'd like to see.

During testing, we've found these new charts to be a lot of fun.  We hope you like them too.  Enjoy!

3 comments :

Eric Walker said...

I dig it, Great Job. Count me in for wanting sales volume displayed on chart. I take it the charts don't show up on the mobile version of the site. Should add a link to view full site as I'm way too lazy to figure out how to make the browser show the non-mobile version. Can't wait for the upcoming rarity rating. :D

Lefloic said...

Nice addition! It's great to see new stuff popping up from time to time.

Is the collection tracking tool still on the roadmap? At least far on the horizon?

JJ Hendricks said...

@Eric - We are looking into ways to get charts to display on the mobile site. Hopefully we can launch that soon.

@Lefloic - The collection tracking feature is still planned but it will be after we track CIB prices and after the rarity ratings. Both of those had much better scores from the survey results. We will get to it though.

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