Top 50 eBay Resellers. Who has the Highest Prices?

Back in September we did a Top 25 eBay Reseller list. We ranked eBay sneaker sellers by number of sneakers sold and total sales (in dollars) for the 12 months prior to September 2013, based on the 722 sneakers that we tracked at that time.  A few weeks ago, TheShoeGame was nice enough to share the data that we collected in an article on their site (which has become a habit for them).

TheShoeGame article generated decent interest from the sneaker community, and we now have another 4 months and 110 sneakers in our database, so it seemed like a good time to refresh (and improve) our eBay seller analysis.

To start, we’ve upped the list from 25 to Top 50 and are ranking by dollars, not number of sales.  We’re using 2013 eBay sales, all sizes, all conditions, for the 830+ sneakers listed in this edition of the Sneaker Price Guide.  Here’s the new list, including previous rank:

Top 50 Ranking – By Sales

Numbers 1 and 2 retained their crowns, which is not surprising considering how much farther ahead of number 3 they both are (637% and 344% more, respectively, in number of sales).  Our previous #9, highfashion85, disappeared from the list entirely – which is odd because 75% of the data was the same in both rankings.  We have 8 new entrants into the Top 25, including croatianstyle who climbed the highest, all the way to #14.  The ShoeZeum, whom we’ve been tracking separately, retained a spot in the Top 10 but dropped four spots to #8.

In addition to sales and dollars, we’ve conducted another analysis:  Who has the highest prices?

We’ve calculated the average price of the DS shoes from each of the Top 50 resellers and compared those prices to the average prices we’ve calculated for the market as a whole (listed in our Sneaker Price Guide).  We then calculated the average Price Deviation percentage for each reseller – that is to say, how much higher or lower their prices are from the average.  For example, if reseller X has an average Price Deviation of +10%, that means that, on average, their prices on DS shoes are 10% higher than the rest of the market.

Here is a very detailed chart showing our results:

Top 50 Ranking – Highest & Lowest Prices

As an alternate view, here are the Top 50 resellers listed in order of average Price Deviation, from lowest prices to highest:

A few notes about our methodology:

• The sales volume and dollars listed above are for sales of sneakers in all conditions – Deadstock and Used – but Price Deviation is just for Deadstock.  We did not analyze the relative pricing of Used sneakers because “Used” can mean anything from VVVVNDS to beater
• We did not attempt to account for any differences due to Buy-It-Now versus true auctions
• Of the 830+ sneakers in our database, only 227 were sold by at least 5 of the Top 50 sellers, which was our criteria for including in our analysis.   This ended up being 14,565 total sales which were used to create these rankings, which represents 83% of the total DS sales by the Top 50.
• There does not appear to be any correlation between Sales Volume and Price Deviation, although we did not perform any regression-type analyses to confirm

A few things we noticed about the resellers:

• Sole Supremacy is the number 1 reseller in both number of sales (7,455) and sales dollars ($1.4 M), and has the third lowest pricing!  In fact, at -8.2% price deviation, they are only .1% away from having the lowest prices.  Incredible!  They only use true auctions, no Buy-it-Now, but they also sell for set prices on their website.  If you take anything away from our analysis, it should be this:  Sole Supremacy is impressive.  
• At +25.3% more than the average, checkmarksthespot is by far the most expensive reseller. Eight others are over 15%.
• Only 12 of the 50 resellers analyzed had a negative Price Deviation.  This means that the large majority of Top 50 resellers (76%) are pricing their sneakers above the market average.  This makes sense because, as we discussed in a previous post, sellers with more eBay feedback can command higher prices than those with less.

Have you purchased from any of these sellers?  What was your experience like?