The Bottom Line
Pros
- A sampling of every eBay category
Cons
- Not enough information on each category or sub-category to be really helpful.
Description
- Will give you ideas for things you can sell or buy on eBay – sports ticket stubs, cereal boxes, theme park tickets.
- Tips for each eBay category
- Interesting tidbits about the more unusual auctions on eBay.
Guide Review - The eBay Price Guide: What Sells for What (in Every Category)
My first thought was "Why do we need a price guide? We can look up past prices for fairly specific items in eBay’s Completed Listings feature." The author, Julia L. Wilkinson, says she "wanted to give the average person a way to quickly scan the huge variety of things now available, and the prices they might get for the things they have to sell." But the sample of each sub-category is so small that I didn't find it helpful.
For example, when I looked up Pottery & China > Art Pottery > Roseville it gives the average sales price in this subcategory of $99.79 and lists 15 items that sold ranging from $860 to $91.88. What if the item I want to look up isn’t one of those 15?
The index contains some lists from eBay. For example, Most Infamous eBay Auctions with the "eBay wedding dress guy" at number one. His ex-wife’s wedding dress sold for $3,850. Other infamous items were the Virgin Mary grilled-cheese sandwich, a house in Denver with a woman as bride, ad space on a pregnant woman’s belly and ad space on a man's forehead. The strangest item sold on eBay was a man’s dignity which sold for $10.50 (no shipping cost in U.S.) with 7 bids.
The author used HammerTap's DeepAnalysis software to retrieve hundreds or thousands of prices from given subcategories and to do specific keyword searches for certain types of items. A demo CD of this software is included with the book.
