some more thoughts/questions on the new appraisal system:
1) Are you combining shipping+price for the appraisal system? To the consumer, most people don't look at the breakdown of 'cost' and 'shipping' separately, they want to know how much does the item cost all together (price+tax+shipping). Therefore, the appraisal system should account for that. A good example is import items. I can either get an item for $75 from BBTS with $10 shipping, or $60 from ebay with $25 shipping. Only using the $75 and $60 would skew the results.
2) How are we handling people who are buying items that are missing accessories? In most cases, if an accessory is missing (not including an instruction booklet), the value drops substantially.
3) Since the ebay system is known to be erroneous, I would think that if there is a substantial number of people adding prices to the system, over a given period of time, that the system would ignore ebay prices. This way, the chances of an error is even further reduced. For instance, for most domestic releases, there should be enough data for the first few months to a year after a release that we shouldn't need to go to eBay.
4) I'm stumped how we should handle the value of an item if people change it's status after they bought it. For instance, if they bought an item sealed and then opened it. For new releases, you will probably see a majority of people buying everything sealed and then opening it. And yet, we can't get an accurate appraisal for an opened item - even if 100s of people are doing it. Any ideas? Should we be gutsy enough to just say the value decreases by 15%? This way, people won't just see their purchase price (which is really for a sealed item). They will see an appraisal of everyone's prices properly calculated down to give an appropriate appraisal.
