@tunicaslot wrote:
Tagging - thanks to all who responded. I usually price by looking at similar solds - take a price in the middle - may add 10% to allow for a BO or sale. Someone mentioned if I used Terapeak and I thought maybe that would give me a better idea of how sellers that have sold their items formatted the titles and priced them - so it may not work how I was hoping to use it.
I actually searched for Kansas City Chiefs Sweatshirt - got 11 results - when I added vintage - got 2 results.
Since I'm not sure how much longer I'll be selling on here for a living - I may just forego Terapeak and start pricing below the midway point and see what pans out.
So typically we use Terapeak for looking things at a larger scale. We used to use it for direct comparisons as well, but not since eBay took over. The poor interface got even worse in their efforts to block information.
Researching categories, gauging interest, top sellers in categories, competitors, trending listings of competitors, etc. Those type of things are what we use Terapeak for. You can search your primary category, see how you're doing compared to competitors. See who the top selling competitors in your category are. Assess their business models, what items are selling best, etc. Think of it kinda like a "macro level" rather than a "micro level".
For what you describe, for pricing, we can't really use any tools for that. Especially with how the eBay search/catalog works. What we do in this case is literally just search our own items, check our search placement, our competitors. We look for any sort of trends that seem to be weighing heavily in the category, and who is placing highest.
We also track our competitors. We have spreadsheets where we log recent information to see if their items are selling better than ours at the prices they set. Since we can't use Terapeak for this part, we manually log the date, sales amount, price. Then check again in the coming weeks.
With the tariffs in effect since October, this has become a much larger job. Items are costing 10-12% more, but many sellers are trying to use their "old stock" at cheaper prices as long as possible before having to order items and pay tariffs. But others are taking advantage of increased prices and putting up their prices. Long story short, many sellers are changing their prices daily, so we have to daily check for some of our more competitive items.
Since search sometimes weighs things like returns or shipping more/less heavily, you have to constantly search your own items nowadays. No way around it. EBay's search seems to change every 2 weeks-1 month lately. There's no such thing as "best practices" anymore, you may have to constantly adapt your business model.
I wish there was better advice I could give than this. But with how volatile eBay's search is, to assess things on a micro level, it takes a lot of searching on eBay... which is extremely frustrating because then you end up noticing all the problems eBay actually has in this area.
