Statistics You Won't Find on eBay
eBay statistics: the most popular categories, average number of bids, and last-minute bidding.
Tags: Sniping, Statistics
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Contents
Note: The research for these questions was performed in the period from 24 November to 2 December 2003
What are the most popular categories
on eBay?
eBay tells you how many items are currently listed in each category,
but that's as far as it goes. To get anything interesting out of this
data you have to extract the numbers and perform some analysis - which
is what we have done. Below is a snapshot of the most popular top-level
categories on eBay, in descending order:
| Category |
Number of Items |
% of Total Items |
| Collectibles |
2,790,047 |
17%
|
| Clothing, Shoes & Accessories |
1,752,844 |
11%
|
| Entertainment |
1,720,951 |
11%
|
| Sports |
1,509,556 |
9%
|
| Home |
1,326,249 |
8%
|
| Jewelry & Watches |
1,253,376 |
8%
|
| Computers & Electronics |
1,117,060 |
7%
|
| Toys & Hobbies |
1,085,657 |
7%
|
| Books |
752,467 |
5%
|
| Everything Else |
577,648 |
4%
|
| Pottery & Glass |
425,740 |
3%
|
| Art |
301,738 |
2%
|
| Dolls & Bears |
270,386 |
2%
|
| Antiques |
254,859 |
2%
|
| Business & Industrial |
221,857 |
1%
|
| Coins |
221,060 |
1%
|
| Stamps |
208,527 |
1%
|
| Musical Instruments |
162,931 |
1%
|
| Tickets |
34,769 |
0.22%
|
| Specialty Services |
24,866 |
0.16%
|
| Travel |
15,480 |
0.1%
|
| Real Estate |
2,108 |
0.01%
|
| TOTAL |
16,030,176 |
|
It is no surprise that collectibles are still eBay's strongest
suit, being the foundation of their business (interestingly, eBay's
code for the Collectibles category is still the number one). A bigger
surprise is eBay's strength in clothing and entertainment, each making
up 11% of total listings.
Lets drill down into the second level of categories - 285 classifications
at the time of writing. The top 20 second-level categories with the most
items listed, in descending order, are as follows:
| Category |
Number of Items |
% of Total Items |
| Clothing, Shoes & Accessories: Women's Clothing |
645,710 |
4%
|
| Entertainment: Music |
575,515 |
4%
|
| Sports: Sporting Goods |
503,224 |
3%
|
| Sports: Cards |
485,666 |
3%
|
| Entertainment: DVDs & Movies |
466,826 |
3%
|
| Entertainment: Memorabilia |
452,871 |
3%
|
| Home: Crafting, Sewing, Art Supplies |
419,843 |
3%
|
| Sports: Fan Shop |
409,804 |
3%
|
| Collectibles: Decorative Collectibles |
305,928 |
2%
|
| Home: Home Decor |
277,080 |
2%
|
| Books: Nonfiction |
276,338 |
2%
|
| Everything Else: Health & Beauty |
275,016 |
2%
|
| Pottery & Glass: Pottery & China |
264,783 |
2%
|
| Collectibles: Animals |
230,843 |
1%
|
| Collectibles: Postcards & Paper |
229,439 |
1%
|
| Entertainment: Video Games |
225,739 |
1%
|
| Clothing, Shoes & Accessories: Men's Clothing: Regular |
225,647 |
1%
|
| Computers & Electronics: Cell Phones & Plans |
216,213 |
1%
|
| Toys & Hobbies: Diecast, Toy Vehicles |
212,841 |
1%
|
| Jewelry & Watches: Charms & Charm Bracelets |
197,707 |
1%
|
This paints an interesting picture - the high specialization
of collectors knocks their categories down the chart, while women's clothing,
craft supplies and home decor make appearances, perhaps reflecting that
many keen eBayers are full-time homemakers.
How many bids do items receive
on average?
We conducted some research into this question using a sample
of 3,500 items across the eBay categories, in proportion to the total
number of items listed in each category (see above). This represents approximately
one item analyzed for every 4,500 currently listed - not a huge number,
but a representative sample. This is what we found:
| Number of Bids |
Number of Items |
% of Total Items |
|
No bids
|
1,891 |
54%
|
|
1
|
797 |
23%
|
|
2
|
174 |
5%
|
|
3
|
125 |
4%
|
|
4
|
122 |
3%
|
|
5
|
87 |
2%
|
|
6
|
57 |
2%
|
|
7
|
43 |
1%
|
|
8
|
36 |
1%
|
|
9
|
33 |
0.94%
|
| 10+ |
135 |
4% |
| TOTAL |
3,500 |
|
More than half of the items received no bids at all, and 23%
received only one bid. However, this does include fixed-price
("Buy It Now") listings and auctions with the "Buy It
Now"
option. But it is interesting that the majority of items listed on eBay
do not attract any competitive bidding for one reason or another.
How many auctions are won in
the last minute?
To answer this question we took our sample of 3,500 auctions
and stripped out items that received zero bids or were won with Buy It
Now, which left 1,413 auctions. Of those, 215 were won in the last minute
- this table shows when they were won:
| Seconds Won Before End |
Number of Items |
% of Total Items |
| 0 |
2 |
0.1% |
| 1 |
28 |
2.0% |
| 2 |
1 |
0.1% |
| 3 |
8 |
0.6% |
| 4 |
1 |
0.1% |
| 5 to 10 |
53 |
3.8% |
| 11 to 20 |
53 |
3.8% |
| 21 to 30 |
27 |
1.9% |
| 31 to 45 |
31 |
2.2% |
| 46 to 60 |
11 |
0.8% |
| TOTAL |
215 |
15% |
Overall, 15% of auctions were won in the last minute, and 2.9%
less than five seconds from the auction end. Note that it does not automatically
follow that sniping software was being used - it is quite possible to
manually bid in the last seconds of an auction. The picture of bids placed
(but not necessarily winning) in the last minute is slightly different
and shows the proxy system at work - sometimes earlier bids were higher
or equal to the last-minute bid, and so took precedence:
| Seconds Bid Before End |
Number of Items |
% of Total Items |
| 0 |
2 |
0.1% |
| 1 |
29 |
2.1% |
| 2 |
2 |
0.1% |
| 3 |
13 |
0.9% |
| 4 |
4 |
0.3% |
| 5 to 10 |
70 |
5.0% |
| 11 to 20 |
63 |
4.5% |
| 21 to 30 |
33 |
2.3% |
| 31 to 45 |
38 |
2.7% |
| 46 to 60 |
11 |
0.8% |
| TOTAL |
265 |
19% |
The total difference of 50 auctions represents last minute
bids that were foiled by the proxy bidding system - in other words one
in five last-minute bids did not win the auction (50 out of 265).
How did you compile these statistics?
The raw data for these statistics was taken from eBay web
pages - the same pages you see when navigating the site with your web
browser. The results were fed into a database where they could be queried
and aggregated.
ASP (Active Server Pages) and VBScript (Visual Basic Script)
were used to fetch web pages from eBay, and convert the HTML
data into a format that could be analyzed. Specifically, MSXML was
used to request the web pages, and regular expressions (using the RegExp
object) were used to locate and extract the data required. Details of
the process for specific questions are below:
What are the most popular categories on eBay?
A single web page contains all the data needed to answer this
question. It was fetched from eBay and regular expressions were used to
extract the names of top-level and second-level categories and the number
of items listed in each category. The data was entered into a database
and queried to answer the question. To see exactly how this was done view
the ASP, HTML and SQL code.
How many bids do items receive on average?
This question was more difficult to answer because eBay's completed
items database must be consulted to find the final number of bids items
receive. A number of factors make this difficult:
- A large number of items, covering every major category, must be
analyzed to get a representative sample of auctions.
- A keyword must be entered to search the database - you can't just
see everything.
- To match the widest sample of auctions a wildcard search is required
(using an asterisk symbol to match any letters), but this
requires at least two letters to be entered before the asterisk.
- eBay tries to prevent automated searching of the completed items
database.
The following approach was taken:
- The results from the "most popular categories" question
were used to calculate how many items should be sampled from each
category. Every category with 1% or more of the total items was included,
with 35 items analyzed for each percentage point - from 595 items
from the Collectibles category to 35 items from Stamps and other 1%
categories. This makes a total of 3,500 items.
- Common digraphs were used as search keywords. A digraph is simply
a pair of letters - the most frequent at the start of words are "th",
"be", "wh", "an", and "no".
By searching for as many digraph-wildcard combinations (e.g. "th*")
as possible in one search, a very wide sample of items can be obtained.
There is a limit to the number of results that can be returned by
the completed items search, and we found a maximum of between 3 and
5 digraphs could be used with the "Any of these words" option,
depending on the category selected.
- eBay would not return results to computer-generated searches, so
we took the approach of searching manually then pasting the underlying
code into a "parser" web page which would quickly extract
the required data.
The data returned was entered into a database and queried to answer the
question. To see exactly how this was done view
the ASP, HTML and SQL code.
How many auctions are won in
the last minute?
The sample of 3,500 items used in the previous answer were taken
as a starting point. The list was refined to include successful full-duration
auctions only - first the 1,891 items with zero bids were removed, then
auctions that ended with Buy It Now.
The next step was to collect the bid data from eBay using an
ASP script which requested the relevant pages one by one, extracted the
bid information using regular expressions, and entered the information
in a database. Finally database queries and Excel were used to identify
the winning bid for each auction, and determine how many seconds before
the auction end each bid was placed. For more information view
the ASP, HTML and SQL code.
Where can I learn more?
