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.