San Francisco Giants slugger Barry Bonds was closing in on Babe Ruth’s home run record during the two weeks spanning April 26 to May 9—and thanks to a recently launched business tool on eBay, eBay sellers could use his progress to score higher prices on the Bonds items they listed.
A chart plotted by eBay’s new Marketplace Research service interface showed interested eBay users in graphic form how sales and closing prices on Bonds-related items jumped during that time on or near the days when Bonds hit home runs and got closer to making history by breaking the record. “A seller or retailer with Barry Bonds memorabilia might use that information to list items based on the potential days when the record could be broken,” says an eBay spokesman.
It’s one example of how eBay’s Marketplace Research service is organizing data on millions of transactions into business intelligence—for a fee. eBay users have been able to get 15 days of historical data on completed transactions in the Completed Listings area of eBay’s site, and they still can. The Completed Listings area simply shows a non-aggregated list of closed transactions. For a charge ranging from about $3 for two days of access to longer history to a monthly charge of $25 for more access and an expanded feature set, Marketplace Research provides access to an interface that organizes that data into a graphical format and allows customizable saved search functionality so they can keep getting the data they want in a chosen format on a recurring basis.
eBay senior director of the technology and media categories Karl Wiley says that marketers are using the data to guide selling strategies, sourcing, pricing and other decisions and that the utility of that data isn’t limited to eBay sellers. With about 100 million registered users in the U.S., what’s happening on eBay is increasingly indicative of what is happening in the Internet marketplace at large. “We are sitting on a treasure trove of information with this transactional data,” says Wiley. “We think of it as a barometer for what’s going on in consumer preferences across any category.”
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