Well, it's about time. The world's leading online auctioneer, eBay (NASDAQ:EBAY), announced plans to market its consumer data with the debut of eBay Marketplace Research. No, eBay won't be telling anyone about your penchant for unicorn figurines. Your secret is safe. However, by lumping all of the information that the dot-com darling routinely gathers as its collective of 168 million users click through its popular trading site, eBay is able to offer insight into some of the latest shopping trends just as they are happening.
Obviously, eBay won't be the first company to use its online prowess to cull and package industrial information. Some companies like Jupitermedia (NASDAQ:JUPM) and International Data Group's IDC unit have been doing just that for years. However, the twist here is that instead of marketing its information to data-hungry corporations, eBay's new service is aimed at the same growing community that it is drawing the data from in the first place.
Are you a perpetual eBay buyer and want to know the average final selling price on your next potential conquest? In the past, your best solution was to search through the past few days of eBay's completed auctions to see how similar auctions panned out. It was a bit clunky, but at least you could see what happened on the site over the two previous weeks. Through three new tiers of research, users can now go back as far as three months to mine for bidding and selling patterns. In terms of convenience, you will now have the average selling price -- and the typical starting price -- spelled out for you.
For sellers, eBay Marketplace Research is an even more powerful tool. You can sort through the most commonly searched terms to make your listing more effective. You can discover the demand for any particular item and price it right, knowing the average final selling prices, the best starting prices, and the number of bids that are likely to be generated along the way.
Yes, eBay is charging for this. From as little as $9.99 a month to as much as $24.99 a month -- with a FastPass option for $2.99 that will grant you two days of data access -- the auction site is definitely out to make money on this.
However, if eBayers don't take to the new suite of research services, I wouldn't be surprised to see eBay drop those prices. Why? Because eBay needs its community to take to these offerings. Smarter buyers and sellers mean more completed transactions. eBay will gladly take its insertion fees for items as they are put up on the virtual bidding block, but the real money to be made is on the completed transactions, where eBay collects a piece of the action.
That's why, once again, eBay is using the massive size of its audience to its advantage. Many other sites offer auctions. Head out to Yahoo! (NASDAQ:YHOO), Overstock.com (NASDAQ:OSTK), and Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), and you will find consumer-to-consumer auction platforms. However, they have never been as lively as eBay and probably never will. Bidders go where the sellers are and sellers go where the bidders are. It's the perfect circle of competitive advantage logic. Now that eBay is ready to strut its stuff with its site's research, it's just going to make the Web's strongest auctioneer even stronger.
eBay and Amazon are active Motley Fool Stock Advisor recommendations, while Overstock was singled out in the Rule Breakers newsletter service.
Longtime Fool contributor Rick Munarriz is a satisfied eBay user -- with the 152 positive feedback recs to show for it. He does own shares in Jupitermedia. The Fool has a disclosure policy. He is also part of the Rule Breakers newsletter research team, seeking out tomorrow's ultimate growth stocks a day early.
