[Robert Stokes]

Before I bid on ebay for a model railway engine I want to know two things. One is the brand new price now, or when last sold, and the other is what examples of the same engine have fetched on ebay in the recent past. I imagine that many of you do the same thing.

I was recently looking at the completed listings for two Bachmann engines and even went back to the original advert to look at some details. In one case I was surprised to find that the actual highest bid was much higher than that recorded in the completed listing section.

I checked several others and quickly found two more such discrepancies and none of the three are small differences. Here are the results of my research which only took 15 minutes. Finding three in this short time suggests that there may be many more.

5th Dec Bachmann standard 4MT tank - completed listing says £35, actual highest bid £50.97, i.e. 46% higher
9th Dec Bachmann Ivatt 2-6-2 tank - completed listing says £17.50, actual highest bid £23.05, i.e. 32% higher
13th Dec Bachmann standard 4MT tank - completed listing says £46.55, actual highest bid £62.19, i.e. 34% higher

So it seems that in some cases, merely looking at the completed listing can give you a totally false impression of what model railway engines fetch (and of course it may be true of other items as well). This will be of interest both to sellers as well as buyers as a seller might be put off advertising an engine if they get a low idea of what it would realise.

I hope that other members of this forum who use ebay will benefit from this.

Cheers, Robert.

 

[spongebob]

Hardly makes you want to sign up to their chargeable market research does it.

Wonder what their excuse is, given their bid count can be anything up to a couple of hours out of date.

 

[poliss]

I can't see any Bachmann standard 4MT tank that ended on 5th December, or ended for £35.00. but I can see the one for £62.19. Strange.

 

[Robert Stokes]

If you do a search under completed listings for "Bachmann 4MT tank" it is the sixth one out of eight shown and is item number 230197314837.

 

[poliss]

I asked on the Ebay forums and someone said it's a glitch that's been going on since last summer.

 

[spongebob]

Nice to see their technical department on top of things as ever. If it's the price to pay for them not messing up the rest of ebay when they fix it then so be it. Their weekly maintenance was only brought about in order to rectify last weeks cock ups.
Never even looked at completed listings until this thread came up.

 

[cmanvell]

Some comments.

1) The last bis shown in the search summaries are often out of date and to see the latest value you must go to the actual auction page. I'm not checking now but maybe those values you cite were the last but one bid (or even earlier).
2) I have found that the completed listings can be far from complete. I looked for one fairly recently and, although I typed in what I knew was in the subject line, nothing showed. When I looked up the auction number and searched on that, up came the auction.
3) Maybe it is becasue of what I am collecting at the moment but I have found that prices can vary massively. I bought two identical Marklin sets recently and one (the first one, naturally) was twice the price of the second!

That's, my tuppence worth.

All the best,
Chris