How to Pull eBay Sold Comps Fast (and Not Get Fooled by One Weird Sale)

Every reseller has lived this one. A card sells around $30 week after week. Then a single no-bid auction closes at $6.50, and the messages start: "sell for $6.50?"

That's the core problem with eBay comps. The data is there, but one weird sale is loud. Here's how to pull comps quickly and read them like a pro. (New to the term? Start with what sold comps are.)

#The 60-second comp

#1. Narrow the search

• Exact item: brand, model, size, edition, color. "Game Boy Color" and "Game Boy Color Pokémon Edition" are different markets.
• Condition: new, used and for-parts are three different prices.
• Sold items only, sorted by ended recently. (You'll need to be signed in to see them.)

#2. Read the results

• Throw out lots and bundles. A console with 12 games isn't a comp for a console.
• Ignore the single lowest and highest sales. That's where the no-bid auctions, damaged items and typos live.
• Take the median, the middle sale. Not the average, which one outlier can drag. Why the median wins.
• Count what's left. Ten or more clean sales is a price. Three is a hint.

#3. Decide

Resellers argue about this endlessly ("Do you buy off the lowest sold comp or the average? I got burned both ways"). A rule that holds up:

• Buy price: make sure you still profit at the low end of the clean range. "I won't source something if I can't make reasonable money at the lowest comp."
• List price: start at the median.
• Check the format. Auctions often close well below Buy It Now sales of the same item. Auction vs Buy It Now.

#When a buyer quotes your one bad comp

Comps are a negotiation tool, and buyers will always find the cheapest one. Don't argue about the sale. Show the pattern:

"28 sold in the last 90 days with a median of $30. The $6.50 one was a no-bid auction that ended at 3am. $30 is fair."

A neutral number with a count behind it is hard to argue with.

#Shipping: compare like with like

A $70 sale with $24 shipping and an $85 sale with free shipping are almost the same price to the buyer. When sales mix free and paid shipping, compare item + shipping for every sale, or item price only for every sale. Just don't mix the two.

#Comps without the clicking

Doing this by hand takes a minute per item. For a pile of 200 items, or inside an app, a sold-listings API does steps 1 and 2 in one request:

GET https://api.soldcomps.io/v1/sold?q=game+boy+color+atomic+purple&condition=used
→ count: 47, stats: { p25: 64.00, median: 74.00, p75: 81.00, excluded: 5 }

p25 is your buy-price floor, median is your list price, and lots, for-parts sales and outliers are already excluded. Every sale also comes back with its shipping and whether it was an auction, so you can split them yourself.