We love tools that use the power of computators to make our lives easier, especially when it also helps us make more money at the same time. In the past we’ve seen a fair number of services like Omgili which help to search forums and deliver up their hidden goodness, so it’s nice to report on a new site which gives the same kind of deep data search for eBay.
Pricegeek is a new service which gives you an instant snapshot of the current market value of any product, based on a deep trawl of the eBay auction site. What makes this service special, though, is the attention to detail and the amount of useful information it delivers.
The Pricegeek developers have gone one step further than other eBay valuation sites, and instead of just giving a bare bones picture of value, they offer up some very cool stats as well, including a nice historical bar chart of price fluctuations (is your camera plummeting in price or holding steady?) and a scatter graph showing current prices of live auctions according to time left.
As well as the basic data, you also get a full listing of all the current auctions with images summaries, so in effect it becomes a complete eBay listing search as well as valuation tool. Of course, the real problem with focusing on live auctions is that most of the price action takes place in the final minutes, so the pricing snapshots are not really very accurate until then. However the site does offer a view of sales which have ended, and they’re a much better guide overall.
The other caveat we have is the fact that you have to be very spot on with your search terms. For instance a search for Canon 5D mark 2 vs Canon 5d mark ii delivers completely different results, which of course means that you have to be careful to try a range of queries, at least until they manage to update the search algorithm somehow.
But all in all there’s a lot to like about this new site. It covers all the main eBay countries, including Australia, UK and Canada as well as the US, and the interface is easy to get to grips with. As with all these evaluation services though (and we tested this against the free eValuator Android app and got similar results) the problem lies in extracting the exact data you’re looking for, among all the low priced accessories and bits and pieces. And we noticed also that it can’t cope with relatively new products because the sample size is too small.
But these niggles notwithstanding, a decent effort and definitely worth keeping in mind if you’re ever in the market to buy or sell stuff on eBay or any other service.
