If I was an active seller of antiques or collectibles, I wouldn't hesitate a minute to subscribe to PriceMiner. Although it won't completely take the place of historical price guides and other research material, it's an excellent addition and a quick way to tell you what's selling online and for how much. PriceMiner is a terrific tool to use when deciding to purchase an item to re-sell or when trying to gauge the current market for a particular collectible.
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Over the years I've seen, and tried out, numerous programs that have used auction results and other sale venues to come up with
historical price information. Unfortunately they've
always had short-comings that made them either difficult to use or
the results were not what I was looking for. I wanted something simple, that tells me what was actually sold
(not just listed),
how much it sold for, when it sold and the item description to help me further evaluate the item.
I've been playing around with PriceMiner for a few weeks now and it's the best pricing program I've seen so far. It's incredibly easy to use, comes up with pertinent results and allows you to save the results after editing and analyzing them. The analyzed results include a price range for all items listed, dates items were sold and a breakdown of the categories items were listed in. And for those of us who love visual props, graphs are also produced for quick references (see samples on right). Data from GoAntiques.com and TIAS.com goes back as far as 1998, with input from eBay auctions starting in January 2005.
For instance, in my particular mission in life -- to eradicate all Little Red Riding Hoods listed as McCoy on eBay -- I decided to get use that as a search term and see what shows up. I found the average price over the last six months, was $67.06 and most of the jars results were listed in the ethnography (black jars) category. And the lowest prices were for jars where the seller was truthful about McCoy NOT making a Little Red Riding Hood jar, something that significantly lowered the average price paid. Although I am sure more jars were sold than the results received, a user needs to remember to play around, trying different search terms to find out what will get the desired data.
PriceMiner is a subscription based service -- $9.95 a month or $99 annually, both for unlimited use. And for those who need this information at their fingertips at auctions, sales or on the road, a mobile version of PriceMiner is available for $14.95 per month. According to PriceMiner, the pricing service is now accessible with handheld devices such as palmOne’s Treo 600 and 650, Sony Clie, Dell Axim and HP iPAQ models and any Web-capable SmartPhone.
From PriceMiner:
“PriceMiner is the first product to combine historical data from multiple external sources with GoAntiques.com’s vast archive of merchandise sales information, perform analysis and then present findings on price averages and ranges,” Kamnikar said. “In addition to GoAntiques.com’s historical price information, PriceMiner includes auction results from the vast eBay® historical database and online storefront sales provided by TIAS.com. We are over 10 million prices realized now, and are adding nearly a million a week.”
