[Patrick_Devine]

The trick here is to make auctions seem _fair_. Every economist loves the idea of an auction because it is inherently more fair to sell a good at the price convergence of what someone is willing to pay with the scarcity of the object. The problem is that it often leaves all of the buyers unhappy. Either you got outbid and are annoyed that you need to keep looking for that good, or you won the auction and potentially feel buyers remorse that you overpaid for that good.

I think the problem here is that Ebay doesn't give any metrics on how frequent an item comes to market, nor does it give any pricing history for how much an object typically sells for. Instead of tackling those problems, they just opted for the "buy it now" button.

[dmalvarado]

You can filter to Sold Listings to see what the average price is. The problem is that in many auctions for similar items are actually not so similar.

I search for camera gear a lot. When it comes to camera bodies, there's a lot of variation. With lens or without, with battery grip or without, what's the shutter count? What's the cosmetic condition? etc. etc.

But generally I just end up with a range by manually looking for the highs and lows, and then try to nab one at a price I think would be a "good deal"

[ghaff]

>I think the problem here is that Ebay doesn't give any metrics on how frequent an item comes to market, nor does it give any pricing history for how much an object typically sells for.

I'm pretty sure you used to be able to search on completed auctions. I seem to remember doing that. But you seem to be correct that there's no way to do it now that I can see.

[mitsubishi77]

You still can; Advanced search > “Completed items” and/or “Sold items”.

[ghaff]

Ah. Thanks. I hardly ever use eBay any longer and I didn’t see that. Good to know. It’s sometimes useful.

[AznHisoka]

The big problem here are bots that bid on stuff at the last minute. That's why I filter out auctions most of the time and just find "Buy It Now" items.