Sold Comps App: What Resellers Need on Their Phone While Sourcing

You're in a thrift store aisle, holding a graphics card in a box. The tag says $250. Is that a buy? You have about 30 seconds before you either put it in the cart or put it back. That decision is what a sold comps app is for.

Here's what one has to do to be useful while sourcing, a fast workflow for the aisle, and when to stop using your phone and switch to something built for volume.

#What a good sold comps app must do

Most "price check" tools fail in the same few ways. A sold comps app worth opening at a garage sale should:

• Show sold prices, not active ones. Asking prices are what sellers hope for. Only sold listings tell you what buyers paid. More on the difference in what sold comps are.
• Give a median, not one sale. A single sale can be a typo, a no-bid auction or a shill. The median of 10 or more sales is a price.
• Show the range. The 25th and 75th percentile tell you how wide the market is, and that's what you base your buy price on.
• Match the exact model. "RTX 3080" and "RTX 3080 Ti" are different cards. "Rolex 16610" and "126610" are different watches.
• Filter by condition. New, used and for-parts are three separate markets.
• Drop lots and for-parts listings. A box of five broken cards isn't a comp for one working card.
• Work without eBay's sign-in wall. eBay now requires you to sign in to see sold listings. In the eBay app that means being logged in, then scrolling and filtering by hand. Fine at home, slow in a checkout line.
• Be fast. If it takes two minutes, you'll skip it and guess.

#The 30-second in-aisle workflow

1. Get the exact model. Read the model number off the label, box or caseback. For electronics it's usually on a sticker. For watches it's the reference number.
2. Search sold, used. Type the model into a sold comps lookup and set condition to match what's in your hand.
3. Check the count. Ten or more clean sales is a real price. Two or three is a guess, so be more careful.
4. Read three numbers. The 25th percentile, the median and the 75th percentile.
5. Decide. Buy if the tag leaves room under the low end. Otherwise put it back.

That's it. You don't need to scroll through 200 listings in the aisle. You need the median and the range.

#Worked example: a used RTX 3080

Here's what used RTX 3080 comps looked like in eBay US sold listings, last 90 days, pulled Oct 23, 2026. Prices move, so check again before you buy.

How to read it in the aisle:

• 161 sales is plenty. This is a reliable price, not a guess.
• The middle half sold between $394 and $515. Most used 3080s land there.
• Use $394 to decide what to pay. That's a realistic price if you want it to sell without waiting, and it leaves room for a scuffed box or a missing accessory.
• List near $432. That's the median, the typical sale.
• Auctions are a small sample here (15 sales), so lean on the Buy It Now number. Why the two formats differ.

So a $250 tag works out like this: about $144 below the low end and $182 below the median, before fees and shipping. Probably a buy, if the card works.

#The buy-price rule of thumb

Pay from the low end, list at the median.

• Your buy decision comes from the 25th percentile, not the median. Not every item you list will hit the typical price, and some will need a price drop.
• Subtract eBay fees, shipping and the profit you want from that low-end number. What's left is the most you should pay.
• List at the median. If it sells fast, you priced well. If it sits, you still have room to come down to the low end and make money.
• Ignore the top sale. The max is where mint, boxed, lucky outliers live. Never buy based on it.

For a deeper walkthrough of pulling and cleaning comps, see how to pull eBay comps fast.

#Why not just use the eBay app?

You can. Sign in, search, tick Sold items, then filter condition. The step-by-step is here. But the app shows you a list, not a number. You still have to spot the lots, skip the for-parts listings and work out the median in your head. eBay's sold search also only goes back about 90 days.

Our free sold comps lookup is a mobile-friendly web page, not a native app, so there's nothing to install. Open it in your phone browser, type the model, and you get the count, median and range with lots and for-parts listings excluded. No eBay sign-in, and you get five free lookups a day.

#When to graduate from your phone

A phone works for one item at a time. It breaks down when you're pricing:

• an estate buyout with 300 items,
• a storage unit or liquidation pallet,
• your whole inventory every week to catch price drops.

That's when you want the same sold search running for every row at once. A sold comps API does it in one request per item:

curl "https://api.soldcomps.io/v1/sold?q=rtx+3080&condition=used" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SALEHISTORY_KEY"
# → { "count": 161, "stats": { "median": 432.00, "p25": 394.00, "p75": 515.00, ... } }

The free plan covers 100 requests a month, and pay as you go is $2.50 per 1,000 requests, with repeat searches within 12 hours free. If you don't write code, the Google Sheets formula puts a median next to every item in a spreadsheet. If you're building your own sourcing tool, read how to build a reseller app on sold data and the reseller pricing use case.

Either way, the habit is the same: sold, not asking. Median, not one sale. Buy from the low end, list at the middle.