Ebay Stamp Sales Totals Last 90 Days

In my opinion one of the greatest values is that it highlights the reason we do not command much influence with ebay. In the past we have often heard stamp buyers and sellers frustrated with ebay policies and procedures; these numbers put that frustration into perspective.
Don

As someone who has more fingers than ebay purchases, the more than one thousand sales per day for more than fifty dollars per item/listing/lot gives me that "come on in, the water's fine" feeling.

And, just to put words in Don's mouth, our explaining to ebay that the stampede (so to speak) would really pick-up if only they would do A & B & C seems like spitting in a blast furnace.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

I reviewed my data and ebay does not include shipping costs in the selling price when they report on a sale. I searched for sales under $5 and here is an example;





The item sold for $4 with $137 shipping charge and ebay report it as a sale under $5. My analysis is limited by the data ebay provides and thus does not include shipping costs.

I am sure there are a lot of small adjustments that could be made but I think there is a large systematic glitch that overshadows these small adjustments. I looked at how ebay reports sales on ebay UK and ebay Germany. I am not certain but I think the data ebay reports is based on the items that ship to a country. If this is correct the US data I analysed includes sales from all ebay site as long as the item ships to US. Perhaps shipping to US is a default but if sellers on other sites can exclude US shipments then these sales will not be included in the data. I think this could be a lot of sales. Maybe an ebay seller outside the US could tell us if they can exclude shipping to US?

When I consider all these small adjustments I think I will use the original data for comparison when I revisit these numbers in 3 months. Teasing out nystamps, Nobelspirit is a lot of work and it is most important to have reproducible data when looking at trends.

srailkb; My 1st look at this data revealed very low median sales often around $3, this was a surprise to me and led to further review. I think there is a cottage industry which buys FDCs for 25c and sell them for $1-2, or buys bulk stamps and sell packets of 100 for $3-4. If you eliminated sales below $5 from the analysis the average is around $35 with good $ volume in the $25-100 range. This makes sense to me because I think ebay fills the niche below the Public Auction sites that rarely sell items for less than $100.

eyeonwall; In addition to Don and Ikey's comments I think the data is interesting because ebay makes it so hard to get. I am watching Hipstamps with interest and I think Mark is doing a lot of smart things. Using this data will help judge Hipstamps progess.

As per shipping charges…
There are two different types of listings; those which show shipping costs and those which do not show shipping costs. (Those which do not show shipping costs have shipping costs 'hidden' in the total cost. For example, as a seller I never charge shipping but I have already included it in the starting price. Thus, the final sales price has shipping cost 'built-in'.)

So if you are not capturing shipping costs you end up with both types of listings; some include it and some do not. What percentage of all listings captured offer 'free' shipping? (I am guessing a significant percentage.)

I think that at best you can only compile the most basic data; for example total number of sales. Once you get into the dollar amounts ebay obfuscates this kind of data for good reasons, they don't want anyone to easily compile information which might give others a competitive advantage.

There are also several 3rd party analytical companies which ebay does provide access to their sales data; and they pay royally for this for this access. You can get the sales numbers from these 3rd party companies but be prepared to write a very big check. It is highly unlikely that ebay would allow people to simply 'strong arm' this data out of the front end and undermine this profit center for them.

And lastly I am unsure how currency exchanges play into all of this; especially over time. If everything is based upon US dollar amounts, then the strength of the dollar could drastically impact any dollar sales totals over time.

You have my respect for the crunching you have tried to do here but most of the dollar calculations are going to be problematic (and very, very difficult). You will have to include a LOT of considerations/assumptions with any conclusions like 'average sale amount' unless you want to ante up for some of the paid 3rd party analytical reports.
Don

I do not see any problem with providing the basic data sales values.

Whether some have postage or not is largely irrelevant when using the information to plot 90 day trends.

For me, any postage amounts included in the sales values on 'free' postage items is no more than a bit of noise not worth worrying about, same as the nystamps dual listing factor.

If I ever want to be paranoid about the exactness of the data I can always subtract $1m off the $34.5m.

The presence or absence of shipping costs, here or there, may bend the curve a bit, but does that matter?

The final dollar cost of stamp sales also includes sales taxes (depending on where the buyer & seller are located), buyer's premiums (in public auction venues) and, what the hey, the extra hinges & mounts & album pages & binders ...

Yes, a change in shipping inclusion/exclusion will change the curve ... but will that really destroy any quarter-to-quarter or year-to-year comparison? Not hardly.

The curve last quarter can be safely compared to the curve next quarter.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

Exactly!

I buy from ebay Germany fairly regularly and there are a lot of sellers who don't ship to the US, or at least they don't list it as an option in the listing.

I'm not going to change any habits based on this data, it's just interesting to look at, nothing more, nothing less. It'll be interesting to look at again in another 90 days and in another 90 after that, etc. The important thing is that the data set being compared is the same every time, I'm not personally too concerned if all factors have been accounted for in the numbers.

It means the shape of the curve is distorted (especially at the lower price end), but yes, this distortion should be roughly the same quarter to quarter (unless one of the big sellers changes their shipping policy)

As there is a natural seasonality to the stamp hobby (less activity during the summer and around the winter holidays), quarter to quarter comparisons will get hit with this seasonality. If you really want to know if things have changed you need to compare the same quarter in two different years.

Which is nullified somewhat because, for example, when it's summer in the northern hemisphere it's winter in the southern hemisphere.

However it will be interesting to see the net effect of different seasons on stamp sales from quarter to quarter.

Thanks for all the work done by KRelyea ,it has been most interesting . The numbers do tell a interesting fact that we already know ,the number of sales is huge and ebay is the Gorilla in the room .
As stated by others ebay doesn't care to be part of any stamp community or affillation with other stamp business ,basically you join them and play by their rule .
What has not been said is the huge amount of viewers that come to ebay each day and that number is much greater than any sales numbers . I believe that number could be 10 to 20 times greater than any sales numbers . I sold for many years at stamp bourses and at many shows ,on the table I had boxes and large envelopes that were never opened or viewed but that has never been the case with ebay ,everything was viewed and many was watched during the years I sold on ebay .

Q/ But how many of those ebay views were by spiders? (search engines)

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

KRelyea:

I assume that these numbers also include covers and postal history which are part of the stamps categories.

For those of us who are cover collectors, is there an easy way to break out the data for just covers and postal history, as we are an entirely different critter from the collector of the pure stamps?

By the way, a GREAT Analysis !

My data includes everything in the "stamps" category ie. stamps, covers, collections, supplies, catalogs etc. You can do the analysis I did on any category that ebay gives you. For example you could analyze any of these;





or you could go down to the next level and analyze these;





All you need to do is go to the category you want, choose the sold option and then tabulate the number of sales for each price range. For the $ amount I used the midpoint of the range and multiplied the # of items sold.

Thanks for the kind words.

The average sale is going to be low in stamps because its the only thing on ebay were the people still think its fine to put the stamp in an envelope and mail it so we can sell cheap single stamps, anywere else on ebay you better have shipping labels etc with a minimum cost of 2.61 to ship just for the postage.