Andale announced a new service called Market Intelligence to aggregate, organize, and analyze eBay sales. Market Intelligence tools range from a free search tool that analyzes, ranks and summarizes auction data, to a detailed competitive analysis reporting tool for sellers. Andale said it obtains data from eBay under a license agreement and uses them, along with its own internal data, to power the Market Intelligence tool. Andale will officially reveal details later this week at the eBay Live conference and plans to rollout the tools individually in the coming weeks. Here's a special sneak preview.
Andale Research
Sellers rely on closed auctions to determine the likely selling price of items they are listing. The more information they have, the better, but eBay removes auction details about 2 weeks after auctions have ended. Andale's research tool can help sellers (and buyers) by providing information about the performance of past auctions going back 52 weeks.
Andale first introduced the Research tool 1 year ago and is enhancing the tool this year. Subscribers can enter a search term, like diamond rings, and Andale Research will determine the average selling price (ASP), price range and sell-through rate. It also comes back with ASP and sell-through for various options. For instance, diamond ring auctions that close on Thursday may perform better than those closing on other days of the week. Sellers can use this data to help them determine starting bids, when to start and end an auction, and what optional features to use in the listing. Andale Research costs $2.95/month, and the company said there are currently 20,000 subscribers to the service.
Andale Compete
A brand new tool Andale will roll out as part of Market Intelligence is called Compete. Subscribers can review detailed statistics about their eBay sales activity. They can review their lifetime ASP and sell-through rate; review their top-performing products by dollar sales, ASP or by sell-through; review average sales price by category; analyze fees; and utilize a profit calculator. The tool offers sellers quite a bit of analysis, and can even review the seller's market share by product or by category.
When Compete is officially launched, it will be priced at $5.95/month. Andale will demo Compete at eBay Live, and will let conference attendees print out their own reports during the show. You can preview a sample screenshot at:
http://presstours.andale.com/compete.html
Andale Sourcing
Andale Sourcing is a free service (anyone who uses Andale's free Counters is eligible) that allows sellers to add their name to a source directory. People who are looking for items to resell can look through the directory for inventory. Sellers can also add a box to their listings says "Do you have one of these you'd like me to sell for you?" Andale said it has 7,000 merchants signed up for the service.
Other Tools
Other tools to be released under the Market Intelligence service are Email Manager and Outsource Your Email. Email Manager plugs into Microsoft's Outlook email client and has automation tools for auction sellers. Outsource Your Email allows sellers to hire an Andale representative to answer auction email for them.
Under the eBay data license agreement, eBay only ships "anonymized" data to protect users' privacy. Andale explained that users can use Compete to check on competitors only as a group and may not check on a specific user.
More details will be available when Andale officially launches Market Intelligence at eBay Live later this week. http://www.andale.com
About the author:
Ina Steiner is Editor of AuctionBytes.com and author of "Turn eBay Data Into Dollars" (McGraw-Hill 2006). She has a background in marketing and research in the high-tech and publishing fields. If you have story ideas, comments or questions, send them to ina@auctionbytes.com.
