How to Calculate Value on Ebay

Thinking of selling something on eBay?  Wondering if it’s worth your time to try and sell it?  Wondering what price to start the bidding at? The best way to get an idea of how much something may sell for is to look at completed auctions.

How do you look at completed auctions?  Well first head to eBay.com.  (Canadians, if you are willing to ship outside of Canada look on the .com site not the.ca site when gauging the value of your item.) Type something into that big search box up in the top left, and click on the search button.

Type something in the search box.

This will bring you to a page listing all of the current auctions that fit your search.  To view completed auctions: look on the left hand side, under “Show Only” check off the box for “Completed listings”.

Check off “Completed listings”.

At this point, if you are not logged into eBay you will be prompted to do so. If you don’t yet have an account on eBay, sign up, it’s quick, painless and free.

Now, as soon as you click on “Completed listings” it re-preforms your search on closed auctions and brings you to the page showing all of the completed listings.  Now you can browse through the closed listings and get an idea of what that certain something is selling (or not selling) for.  If there are a bunch of successful closed listings, you can look through the ones with the highest closing bids and try and figure out what made them so successful.  Where they listed in a different category?  Did they have a higher or lower opening bid?  If there are multiple pages worth of closed listings you can simply things by sorting by “Price: Highest First”.

Use the Sort drop down box and choose “Price:Highest First”.

That’s it folks.  Easy stuff.   Keep in mind that searching through completed listings will only show you the last two weeks worth of items.  So while this can give you an idea of what you’re item is worth, it’s not always accurate.  Pricing on eBay can fluctuate wildly. Sometimes it pays to check several times over the course of a few weeks.  Overall, taking the time to search complete listings should give you a general idea of whether you should pitch something or hold on to it. If you can find several successful auctions selling the same thing, odds are it’s worth your time to list yours as well.