Hi everyone,

I'm not much of a watch flipper, but being the nerd that I am I thought it'd be good to start a thread to track bidding history and amount history for items you sell on eBay. This would help give both buyers and sellers an idea of where an auction will end. I've looked for similar stats on Google, but since vintage watches go for a premium, I didn't think that data very valid. Off the top of my head I was thinking:

1) Number of bids on days 1 through 7
2) Number of bids in the final 12 hours, 6 hours, 3 hours, 2 hours, 1 hour
3) Amount of current bid at the above intervals compared to final sell price

So for instance, if you have an item listed for auction or are interested in an item listed for auction, it'd be nice to know that the current bid with 12 hours left is likely to be roughly 70% of the final winning bid.

Anyway, let me know if you have any interest in this. Also let me know if you have anything to add to the list of items to track. Once enough data is compiled, it can easily be dissected and graphed to give more accurate predictions.

Adam

 

One bid, in the last few seconds. Anything else is pointless.

 

I have other interesting eBay watch data though. Number of watches sold by brand and average price. Anyone interested in that?

 

I am always a big fan of data. Please share!

 

I wasn't suggesting to show when the best time to bid was; I was thinking more along the lines of helping both buyers and sellers estimate where an auction might end up based on where the current bid is at a given point during the auction.

 

You can never know where an eBay auction (or any auction for that matter) might end up. When it comes to eBay which has a timed auction format, (as opposed to an auction house auction, where there is no time restriction and the bids go up by increments until one bidder gives up) the current eBay bid price has absolutely nothing to do with the final winning bid/selling price. I've been on eBay since the late 90's and I've seen thousands of items sell at an auction format where the final bid ends up being double or even triple what the "Current bid" was just 3 seconds prior.

"Where an auction might end up" only depends on how much the last two bidders are willing to pay for the item. One will lose, one will win.
This is especially true when it comes to vintage watches. Where no two examples will ever be 100% identical. Therefore, a hot piece might generate a bidding frenzy and can go crazy in the last 5 seconds if two bidders must have that one particular example.

 

I don’t want to persuade you not to investigate. But I have been buying and selling on eBay for over a decade (not all watches), and I can tell you first hand that the evidence will likely be a scatter graph.

There are likely too many factors to account for in your data (value of item being on the top, number of listings of the same or similar items, starting bid, rating of seller, etc) that you would need to control to have a usable data set.

For example, some items have 2 bids for a week and then have 15 bids within the last minute. Price increasing hundreds fold higher than the original 2 bids. This will be increasingly true for expensive pieces, as snipers like @oddboy aren’t going to waste time bidding early. I find myself slapping in an early bid only on items I want to have additional notifications on so I don’t forget to bid.

On the other hand, I have sold items that had an initial bid within the first day of the listing that won. These are typically because the starting bid is close to what the market is on the item. So it’s not really telling of how or when or why people bid but really just a reflection of value.

 

I think you missed the point. Perhaps interest earlier on in an auction is predictive of a higher sale price later on. I have won watches that I assumed I'd lose because of sniping and there was little interest so my highest bid remained intact.

You could even incorporate sniping into these questions. Do Constellations have more snipers out there? Is early interest in a watch predictive of how many snipers there would be later on? How much do vintage Omegas see prices go up because of sniping?

These are all questions that you could answer if you had data.

 

Very true. This would only be for estimation purposes, and there will always be outliers. It may even be a scatter graph as WYO_watch suggested. Can't really know until you have the data. That being said, most everything resorts to averages in the end. And yes, some things would best be controlled for (seller rating, starting bid since it impacts number of bids), and it probably wouldn't hurt to break auctions into different price brackets (<$1000; $1000-$5000, >$5000). I just thought it'd be nice to have a thread where people can post their data so that we could see.

 

I don't think I missed the point. With eBay auctions, you decide on your max bid and snipe it. For me anyway, I decide if I want a piece first, then how much I would pay, then snipe. I may check the item as it approaches the end to see if I'm still in the running, but I don't think early bidding activity is really any indication of where an item will end up.

By all means to OP, gather the data. I could be totally out to lunch. But for me, all but the last seconds are just chatter and noise.

Edit: and just to add, unlike some other proxy bidding systems, if my bid is the highest, I will only pay the next increment to be the winner, so I can go Ashley on an item (than means my max bid could be 100 or 1000 times more than I think the final price will be), but that's not what I will pay. I will only pay the next increment.

 

https://omegaforums.net/threads/ebay-watch-sales-november-data-from-multiple-regions.68102/

ebay data pull.