180911 Bold inaccuracies in BP dbase

[crayxlp]

as others (not being in US region) Im quite disappointed that BP for the course of the past year is unable to display "avg prices" for a lot of sets outsde the US region. Im familiar with methodics that there has to be some relevant amount of sets being sold (cca 50 or so) to publish some relevant information.. but what should I think of the situation when the first wave of BrickHeadz for the last 6 months HAS NOT GOTTEN any EU, UK or AUS relevant price????

These items are being sold on the espective ebay sites. And not liike "two per month".. I took that time to compare some sold listings on UK ebay:

75059 Sandcrawler.  within the period of June 14 - September 10 reports 46 sold NEW listings for a total of 11.405 GBP (from that 4 listings were sold for the best offer, the total of these 4 listed were round 1000 GBP),. if I go by simply dividing the amount of listings sold, I get 11405 / 46 = 248 GBP..  how comes, the BP states that the avg value for this period is 268.50 GBP??

as for the above mentioned BrickHeadz.. I chose 41589 Captain America. within the same period 37 confirmed sold listings on ebay.co.uk.. OK, its a little bit below 50 . but if you take a wider look at the period between March - September.. thats quite a long time frame to get AT LEAST SOME AVERAGE VALUE!

Im really disappointed in the accuracy of BP stated "market prices" .. and I would frankly really like to see ALL THE STATS for 75059 sold @ ebay UK between June 9 and September 7 (last BP updates) that would justify the issued avg price of 268.50 GBP.."

Edited September 10, 2018 by crayxlp

[KShine]

Your dissapointed??? What do you want, a refund?

[iahawks550]

You get what you pay for. Seriously, quit bitching about the database. It's like someone giving you a car for free and you complain it doesnt go fast enough 

[whoisbiggles]

hahaha just work it out for yourself.

[terrymc4677]

Oh my. You've used bold print. You must really mean business! What's next? Italics?

[ravenb99]

I looked up set 180911 then was pissed when I realized it was a silly EU date format and a day ahead of me no less.  Pre Happy Bday to my wife while I'm at it though seeing I got the date on my mind now.

[Sfcommando14]

This site is just a message board at this point.  People keep complaining about the database, but it clearly isn't worth the time or effort.  I'm sure the Mack's would love a few volunteers who want to do the work.

[ravenb99]

1 minute ago, Sfcommando14 said:

This site is just a message board at this point.  People keep complaining about the database, but it clearly isn't worth the time or effort.  I'm sure the Mack's would love a few volunteers who want to do the work.

would think most don't want to see there values with as much doom and gloom there is

 

[whoisbiggles]

22 minutes ago, terrymc4677 said:

Oh my. You've used bold print. You must really mean business! What's next? Italics?

Or red text?

[Val-E]

4 hours ago, ravenb99 said:

I looked up set 180911 then was pissed when I realized it was a silly EU date format and a day ahead of me no less.  Pre Happy Bday to my wife while I'm at it though seeing I got the date on my mind now.

Excuse me? We invented the date format and we also invented Lego. You guys got ISO 8601 and Megabloks.

Happy birthday to your wife too - wouldn´t want to forget that, whatever the format.

[Legojona]

54 minutes ago, Val-E said:

Excuse me? We invented the date format and we also invented Lego. You guys got ISO 8601 and Megabloks.

Happy birthday to your wife too - wouldn´t want to forget that, whatever the format.

Silly Europeans with their date format, their 24h time and their metric system. Perhaps the Americans can think of a way to make a system that works for the whole world based on the length of an average 14th century elbow?

[Val-E]

3 hours ago, Legojona said:

Silly Europeans with their date format, their 24h time and their metric system. Perhaps the Americans can think of a way to make a system that works for the whole world based on the length of an average 14th century elbow?

No, they would have each day named after a former president and the time would always be Miler Time brought to you by the Dodge RAM and Camping World.

More seriously, their Brickfolios would all be in the red due to having cracked open the seals on their Megabloks USS Enterprises to check and claim for all the missing parts....

[crayxlp]

9 hours ago, ravenb99 said:

I looked up set 180911 then was pissed when I realized it was a silly EU date format and a day ahead of me no less.  Pre Happy Bday to my wife while I'm at it though seeing I got the date on my mind now.

You are wrong assuming this is some standardized EU format date.. its not.. its just my "trick" how to keep the folders in computer organized in a timely fashion -from the oldest at the top to the newest at the bottom - thus YY MM DD..

10 hours ago, KShine said:

Your dissapointed??? What do you want, a refund?

c'mon .. what the use of price index (taken accurate for granted] - when its not? 

[Val-E]

To be fair, accurate pricing from Ebay is nigh on impossible now the Chinese fakes are on the market as they are listed and sold as Lego.

Jeff does a  good job at filtering but it would be a full time job to get all the outliers and all the sets price correctly. Then we have exchange rate fluctuations and all other sorts of variables.

 

[cladner]

price is dependent on marketplace (amazon, ebay, bricklink, facebook/cl etc) and what country you are selling in.

i haven't paid attention to brickpicker price tracker because its not tracking my selling marketplace.

as far as i'm concerned the only real use of the price index is to see how a set is doing over time - price changes over time will generally be the same over any platform.  no real financial incentive to maintain the index which would  be significant work.  people aren't paying for subscriptions here.

back in the day, you could look up an individual set on brickpicker and see its price chart over the preceding 6 months on ebay.

unfortunately that disappeared during one of the updates so now you have to keep track of prices on sets you follow manually or just buy lower and sell quicker so that you aren't wasting precious seconds of your life tracking the value of a set (instead you can spend them in a walmart clearance aisle).

Edited September 11, 2018 by cladner

[KShine]

There has always been too many subjective variables regarding valuations - so even when they are 100% accurate (reflective of all data, filtered or not), they are still wrong.

[kumas]

hopefully everybody will buy/sell oop Lego on Bricklink in 10 years and we dont have to mess with amazon/ebay (at least I tell to my ebay customers to look at BL next time)

[Val-E]

4 minutes ago, kumas said:

hopefully everybody will buy/sell oop Lego on Bricklink in 10 years and we dont have to mess with amazon/ebay (at least I tell to my ebay customers to look at BL next time)

If we take Bricklink values then we might as well all retire

[KvHulk]

Remove the database. Problem solved.

[Ed Mack]

19 hours ago, crayxlp said:

as others (not being in US region) Im quite disappointed that BP for the course of the past year is unable to display "avg prices" for a lot of sets outsde the US region. Im familiar with methodics that there has to be some relevant amount of sets being sold (cca 50 or so) to publish some relevant information.. but what should I think of the situation when the first wave of BrickHeadz for the last 6 months HAS NOT GOTTEN any EU, UK or AUS relevant price????

These items are being sold on the espective ebay sites. And not liike "two per month".. I took that time to compare some sold listings on UK ebay:

75059 Sandcrawler.  within the period of June 14 - September 10 reports 46 sold NEW listings for a total of 11.405 GBP (from that 4 listings were sold for the best offer, the total of these 4 listed were round 1000 GBP),. if I go by simply dividing the amount of listings sold, I get 11405 / 46 = 248 GBP..  how comes, the BP states that the avg value for this period is 268.50 GBP??

as for the above mentioned BrickHeadz.. I chose 41589 Captain America. within the same period 37 confirmed sold listings on ebay.co.uk.. OK, its a little bit below 50 . but if you take a wider look at the period between March - September.. thats quite a long time frame to get AT LEAST SOME AVERAGE VALUE!

Im really disappointed in the accuracy of BP stated "market prices" .. and I would frankly really like to see ALL THE STATS for 75059 sold @ ebay UK between June 9 and September 7 (last BP updates) that would justify the issued avg price of 268.50 GBP.."

Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I think the price guide will eventually move to only values from the United States, like it was at the beginning of BrickPicker.  Values from outside the US have always been difficult to acquire and aggregate.  Many times there are language issues/conflicts that affect the way the information is gathered and utilized.  Honestly, there is just not that much demand for these values outside of the United States.  

There is another issue as well...money.  We have never charged anything for the data, but it costs us a substantial amount to obtain it.  Affiliate advertising has changed tremendously over the past decade.  eBay basically pays us nothing from what they did 10 years ago.  Target is done paying us.  Toys R' Us never paid anything.  Skimlinks and Amazon are what basically keeps the site running and that is barely enough.  

The US secondary LEGO and reselling market is much larger and viable.  This is just a fact.  I wish we could give you exact values for all 10,000+ sets in the database, but that will never happen with data from outside of the US.  With the differences in currencies and languages, it is just too difficult to make the non-US data perfect.   Unfortunately, it would take a substantial monetary and time investment to make this work.  This investment is not a worthy one at the moment...Sorry.

[exciter1]

6 minutes ago, Ed Mack said:

Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I think the price guide will eventually move to only values from the United States, like it was at the beginning of BrickPicker.  Values from outside the US have always been difficult to acquire and aggregate.  Many times there are language issues/conflicts that affect the way the information is gathered and utilized.  Honestly, there is just not that much demand for these values outside of the United States.  

There is another issue as well...money.  We have never charged anything for the data, but it costs us a substantial amount to obtain it.  Affiliate advertising has changed tremendously over the past decade.  eBay basically pays us nothing from what they did 10 years ago.  Target is done paying us.  Toys R' Us never paid anything.  Skimlinks and Amazon are what basically keeps the site running and that is barely enough.  

The US secondary LEGO and reselling market is much larger and viable.  This is just a fact.  I wish we could give you exact values for all 10,000+ sets in the database, but that will never happen with data from outside of the US.  With the differences in currencies and languages, it is just too difficult to make the non-US data perfect.   Unfortunately, it would take a substantial monetary and time investment to make this work.  This investment is not a worthy one at the moment...Sorry.

They can just take the US values and subtract 20%. Easy peasy...

[Ed Mack]

1 minute ago, exciter1 said:

They can just take the US values and subtract 20%. Easy peasy...

Pretty much.  The data/price difference between countries is usually consistent.

[Val-E]

1 hour ago, exciter1 said:

They can just take the US values and subtract 20%. Easy peasy...

If it´s good enough for Jeff Bezos, it´s good enough for me.

[crayxlp]

4 hours ago, Ed Mack said:

Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I think the price guide will eventually move to only values from the United States, like it was at the beginning of BrickPicker.  Values from outside the US have always been difficult to acquire and aggregate.  Many times there are language issues/conflicts that affect the way the information is gathered and utilized.  Honestly, there is just not that much demand for these values outside of the United States.  

There is another issue as well...money.  We have never charged anything for the data, but it costs us a substantial amount to obtain it.  Affiliate advertising has changed tremendously over the past decade.  eBay basically pays us nothing from what they did 10 years ago.  Target is done paying us.  Toys R' Us never paid anything.  Skimlinks and Amazon are what basically keeps the site running and that is barely enough.  

The US secondary LEGO and reselling market is much larger and viable.  This is just a fact.  I wish we could give you exact values for all 10,000+ sets in the database, but that will never happen with data from outside of the US.  With the differences in currencies and languages, it is just too difficult to make the non-US data perfect.   Unfortunately, it would take a substantial monetary and time investment to make this work.  This investment is not a worthy one at the moment...Sorry.

Hello Ed,

besides my rather negative submission above, I truly appreciate your honest and straight answer. Now we all know what to expect. Do you have any plans for some kind of updating prices in non-US regions based on a volunteers' efforts? There must be hundreds of us from outside the US that use your immense database of prices on a maybe daily basis - and for free. I can easily imagine that (if given the methodics how you calculated the avg prices for e.g. UK market until now), we (around0 could do that on a manually basis and submit the final values to you to update the dbase.. everybody could pick up some "theme" (season) to be responsible for that would not exceed 20-30 sets and quaterly submit the data based on the sold listings on a respective ebay site. I would have no problem with that to volunteer. Perhaps later on you could think of some pros and cons for those who would engage such as limited searches per day for those not being involved etc.. 

Edited September 11, 2018 by crayxlp

[crayxlp]

20 hours ago, terrymc4677 said:

Oh my. You've used bold print. You must really mean business! What's next? Italics?

Some of us around here are more creative than you would think..