Thursday, October 27, 2016

PriceCharting is Tracking 9,000 More eBay Game Listings Every Day

We made a recent change that tracks 9,000 more video game listings on eBay every day. This leads to thousands of additional sales in our database each day.

This additional data improves our price calculations and our sales history....especially for less common games.


How We're Tracking More Listings

eBay has product identifiers on their site. When someone sells a game they can tell eBay "this is the game I'm selling". On some products, like Call of Duty Black Ops III, there are hundreds of listings available and we track 10-20 sales per day.

On other games eBay doesn't offer a product identifier or sellers never it. Contra for NES is a good example. The product identifier for that game has a measly 7 listings, yet Contra sells copies every day.

We used to limit ourselves to only tracking listings with a product identifier attached.

Now we can infer the product from the listing title with very high accuracy. This allows us to link those listings to a game on our site. We can do it even when seller's use different punctuation, nicknames, or aliases.

For example:
"Super Mario 3 [Nintendo NES] Complete in Box"
"Mario 3 (Nintendo) with Box and Instructions"
"Super Mario Brothers 3 for NES **Game + Case + Manual**"

All of these can automatically be associated with Super Mario 3 for NES in CIB condition.

After the change went live, Contra went from a 1-2 sales per month to 1-3 sales per day.

Tuesday, October 18, 2016

Automatically Value Video Game Lots on eBay with Our "eBay Lot Bot"

We just launched a new tool we're calling the eBay Lot Bot. It automatically calculates the value of every video game lot available on eBay.

You can browse every lot available and look at the photos, listing title, and the value. If you see one you like you can click to read the description, see what games are included in the value, and buy it on eBay if you think its a good deal.

Tips for Browsing for Game Lots

Filter by Console:
The results are always filtered by console.

Nintendo NES, Atari 2600, and Xbox 360 are included for everyone for free. Other consoles can be added for as little as $1 for one additional console or $5 for every console.

Sort by Ending Time:
You can see the available lots sorted to show those ending soonest first. Or see newly listed lots first.

Ending soonest will show some good auction deals below their value. Newly listed will show some Buy It Now deals that might be a steal.

Filter by Listing Type:
You can filter results to show only auctions, only Buy It Now listings, or both, whichever you prefer.

Tips for Looking at Lot Details

The lot details page for each listing will show the listing description the seller used, all the photos included, the games found, and the total value of the lot.

Listing Description: The listing description will appear almost exactly as it does on eBay. Every title found by the Lot Bot is highlighted in red.

Games Found The games found in the listing are shown on the left side of the description with their value.

We aim for about 90% accuracy on the matches but we will miss some titles due to spelling errors or ambiguity (seller said "cooking mama wii", is that "cooking mama cook off" or "cooking mama world kitchen"?).

You can add any titles missed and they will be added to the total value.

You can also remove titles by clicking the 'x' next to it.

 
Please try out the video game Lot Bot. Let us know what you think. Will this be useful for you? How can we improve it?

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