We’ve been working on a big new feature at OAXRAY that should be a big help for those who sell on eBay or just want to be aware of the multiplicity of possibilities that exist to flip products for a profit.  For all of the stores we now support, you can now get the calculations based on the Average eBay Sold price.  Before we get into the “how-to,” a few caveats:

• This feature is in *Beta* and we’re continuing to tinker with it to make it the best it can be.
• This works only with eBay items that have a clear product identification code of some kind – UPC, ISBN, EAN, etc. – keyword matching back to eBay isn’t really possible given the wide array of eBay titles on listings.
• This metric averages all matching listings – but for various reasons – e.g., item being sold during Christmas spike, something is collectible, etc – there may be good reasons why a few of the listings went for an inflated price, making the average higher.  We’ll continue to explore ways to get the most actionable data possible, but for now, know that this is simply part of the landscape.  You will almost certainly run into many false positives.
• Because eBay doesn’t have an API robust enough to do what we need, we’re gathering the data ourselves and the only thing we have to link products together are the unique identifier codes such as UPC, ISBN, EAN.  To the extent that sellers have used these incorrectly, we are vulnerable to the same bad data.  Garbage in, garbage out.  Again – this is part of the landscape.  But we’ll continue to explore ways to see what can be done to mitigate the bad data.

Okay, now on to how you can get this new feature working for you.

First, you’ll need to go into your extension settings and then down where it says “Marketplace,” select eBay from the list.  Be sure to hit save.  Then go to a page you’d like to source and scan as normal, pressing the OAXRAY extension icon.  The main tab sheet will look as it does on normal scans – the eBay column says “Ebay Avg Sold” and it comes after all of the source stores.  In some future version, we’ll likely move it to the left in front of the source stores or integrate it with the Amazon price column, but for now it is after the source stores.  The Net Profit and ROI calculations are based off the Ebay Avg Sold column.  Because the data is not as comprehensive with eBay as it is with Amazon, there are items that have no price in the Ebay Avg Sold column.  In these cases, the ROI and Net Profit won’t work because the calculation is messed up by the null value.

If you click on one of the hyperlinked eBay prices, you’ll be taken to a special page where you can see in more granular details the exact listings that are being used to come up with the average eBay price.  This is useful because you may be able to quickly identify an outlier or two and get a better sense of the true market value on eBay.

That’s all there is to it – OAXRAY has opened up a whole new world of possibilities with this tool.  Now you’ve got a way to take advantage of Amazon Prime benefits that Amazon’s policies prevent with Amazon to Amazon flips.

Even if you don’t intend to sell on eBay, this can be another data point to help you identify current prices people are actually paying for products.