Calling Web Developers, I have an idea... Options

[McMark]

I had an idea that I can't implement, but I think is good. It would be cool if we could have a place where people could enter their used parts sale prices and condition. We could then get the mean value biased by condition to give a market value for used parts. There is a lot more complexity that could be added to the algorithm, but what do you think of the core idea?

[campbellcj]

This thought has crossed my mind several times before; in fact, it's part of what I do as a day job. One essential enabling technology in order to spider web sites and aggregate/analyze market pricing data, is a structured cataloging and taxonomy system. Otherwise you have no chance of comparing apples-to-apples pricing data, or of matching "want-to-buy" ads to "want-to-sell" ads, on an automated high-volume basis.

We all know that there are lots of sites trying provide price-comparison data for consumer electronics/computer products, but the results are very spotty. At most they help provide links to dealer sites to check out that you may not have been aware of beforehand. They are very poor at providing real-time availability, condition (for used items) or location data. In many cases they are "skewed" because they rely on partners or even paid sponsors to provide the content, i.e. sellers have to willingly agree to show their prices alongside their competitors' prices.

Pure auction sites like eBay are great for buyers and sellers of "one off" items, but are completely reliant on seller labor to classify, describe and track items for sale, which is highly inconsistent but also highly scaleable and cheap. Also, there is substantial effort and risk on the buyers' end since it is essentially an unregulated "swap meet" environment.

Unfortunately the kind of software, content-management, and sales/customer-service labor that is involved in doing this the "ultimate way", probably is not feasible for markets such as 30-year old p-car parts. It is however feasible for certain markets such as ET&M instruments, aircraft subsystems, machine tools, high-end computer servers/workstations, etc. Or possibly used cars/trucks! A few years ago when I studied this issue in detail, the ROI required an average transaction size around $5K, give or take.

The plus side is, for most of our "hobbyist" purposes, crude keyword-based searches and plain old brute force browsing (i.e. the eBay or BBS Classifieds model) accomplishes decent results. We just check the listings as often as we can, sometimes having to sift thru the same ones over and over, and pray that the item we need will show up! If you are looking to buy/sell something a bit rare and in-demand (i.e. a few 0's behind the price), however, this manual process becomes very non-optimal.