The subscription-based tool, dubbed as eBay Marketplace Research, gives users access to listing, bidding and pricing trends to help optimize their deals. The BI it serves up is pretty basic — customizable data, charts and graphs that depict historical and real-time transaction trends of online activity.
For buyers, the tool reveals average sold pricing to help them with their bidding strategies. It also gives them useful information about products like the number of times it has been listed and average bids it has received.
For sellers, Marketplace Research analyzes historical data (up to 90 back) to uncover trends like starting prices, average sold prices, and popular search terms, to help them tweak their sales strategies accordingly.
The company’s timing is spot-on, coming on the eve of the holiday season when traffic on the auction site is expected to reach peak levels.
San Jose, California-based eBay says it has 168 million users and 60 million listings worldwide.
eBay is certainly taking a more proactive approach to help users of its marketplace in their buying and selling strategies these days. It also recently included product reviews and guides on its site.
Marketplace Research is sold as a three-tier subscription service – ranging from $3.00, for basic two days of use or $10.00 for a month (both analyzing 60 days of data) as well as professional version that provides analysis for 90 days of historic transaction data.
