Ebay Stamp Sales Totals Last 90 Days

We have been talking about the importance of stamp sales to ebay but ebay does not make it easy to see what the total sales actually are. I sat down and spent a couple hours teasing out the data and it is presented below. This data shows the total number of sales and the total $ sales in the last 90 days broken down by High Level category under stamps. I have no idea if the $34 million in stamp sales over the last 3 months is significant to ebay, I'll let the ebay stockholders among us debate that question.

I have some additional data but I'll post that later.

It would be interesting to compare that total to the total from traditional auctions over the same period of time. How significant a chunk of the stamp market is $34.5M? That is about $140M annually. Seems like a large chunk of the stamp market, but maybe I am missing something?

It would be also very interesting to see a graph or histogram illustrating the distribution of prices.

According to Yahoo financial, ebay has total revenue of 7.91 billion, as reported for the last year. Their gross profit was 6.82 billion and their net income, which I believe is after taxes is 1.86 billion. They obviously are very profitable.

For the last quarter of 2016 ebay's total (global) sales were $20.68 billion*. So the $34M in stamp sales noted above would represent about 2/10th of 1% of sales for them.
Don


*Source: https://www.internetretailer.com/20...e-and-profit = gross value of goods sold. I think the 7.91 billion number that TR mentions above is net revenue.

Edit: The numbers directly above are annual and I just noted that Ken's number is for just the last quarter. So if ebay's quarter was around $5B than the stamps $34 million would represent >1%.

In terms of everything that they sell, stamps are a drop in the bucket. However, in terms of stamps, they may be the biggest stamps sales venue.

I will be posting a distribution of prices, that's how I derived the data.

KRelyea, thanks for doing this, I find it very interesting.

It would be interesting to compare this to, say, ebay sales of iPads alone.

Here's a distribution of items sold and $ sales for the entire stamp category.










The number of items sold doesn't show up well on the Histogram because the range of #s is too large. One thing I see that stands out to me is that low price items make up a large proportion of sale items but contribute a much lower amount of $. As Don pointed out each electronic sale costs the same so clearly the low price item aren't contributing proportionally to ebay profits.

There were 77,000 Ipad sales in the same period with 115 over $1000. The entire Tablet & ereader category had 177,000 sales with 1041 over 1000.

I will post US stamp data shortly.

WOW very interesting to say the least. Would be interesting to see individual stamp sales numbers (ex Scott #1) breakdowns on actual sale price ranges but to get that level of detail would probably take years.

There are lots of things that can go wrong with a stamp sale, eg, the buyer discovers thins, repairs, etc, that are tough to spot on the best of scans.

Yet, more than one thousand items sold each day for over fifty dollars each.

That can be read as strong evidence that ebay's severe bias towards buyers - one of the earliest & most consistent of ebay policies - is paying off nicely ... for everyone.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

ikeyPikey how are you coming to that conclusion? Why assume the lots that close over $50 are individual stamps? I would think that a large portion of the lots that close over $50 include multiple items.

As promised the following is the data for ebay sales in the last 90 days in the US Stamps category;







A couple weeks ago a poster was complaining about the lack of differentiation in the Germany category. I took a quick look at Germany and France and I think the #s support making Germany and France a separate category similar to GB, Australia and Canada.

Germany had 97,000 items sold and France had 72,000 items, these numbers are larger than many of the other categories and I think could support having their own category.

As for doing this analysis on SC #1 it's not hard to do but I think the problem would be getting "clean" data using the ebay search capability. Any search I try turns up a lot of extraneous data that would have to be cleaned line by line and even then you may be missing many candidates.

Agreed, but ... they used the word 'items', and I used the word 'items' ... and, as they say, fifty bucks is fifty bucks.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

Ken,
How are larger lots and collections represented in your numbers? It appears you had to push them into one of the country categories ('US stamps')but lots and collections can contain stamps from other countries.

In your spreadsheet you use the term 'items'...does this really mean 'listings'?
Don