Part One: Kicks0l0gy and The Tale of the Golden Sneaker
A few months ago we received an email from, perhaps, the most famous female sneakerhead there is: Kicks0l0gy. She was hunting the Air Max 1 Liquid Pack and, as any intelligent sneakerhead would do, had gone to the Campless Price Guide to arm herself with sneakerheadata and gain some leverage in negotiations. But alas, these T2-looking kicks were not amongst the many sneakers we currently track. Being the motivated buyer, Kicks0l0gy reached out to us for help. We of course obliged and wrote a custom query to calculate the true market price of the Liquid Pack. A couple of days later and BOOM, our homegirl found her pot of gold – and for hundreds less than the seller had been asking.
To better understand why Campless data allowed Kicks0l0gy to cop a better deal, take a look at this chart:
Here we can see that the average asking price on eBay (i.e., auctions which end with no sale) is considerably higher than the actual sales price (i.e., auctions that end with a sale). Logically, this makes complete sense as good deals will be quickly purchased while overpriced auctions will sit. Thus, when someone goes to eBay to price a pair, what they are probably looking at are overpriced listings which haven’t (and won’t) sell. We take a very deep-dive into the topic of perception price vs. actual price in “eBay Prices Are a Lot Better Than You Think” and “Why is the Black AJ3 Vapor is So Expensive?” But for now the point is simply that we provided this data to Kicks0l0gy and she was able to use it to her advantage.
Warning, if you try this approach yourself (see Air Max 1 Liquid packs for sale here) keep in mind that the above data was pulled on September 14th. Asking prices appears to have gone up, but the principle remains the same: eBay asking prices are way higher than actual sales prices. You can use the same ratios as above and assume that actual selling prices are 25-30% lower than asking for these shoes.
What does this mean?
The real purpose of this story is actually not to highlight how unbelievably valuable and useful and great and awesome and great and valuable and cool and awesome and useful our data is. Because it is. It’s so great, in fact, that it temporarily incapacitated our writing skills and left in its place a non-coherent, braggadocios sentence.
Seriously though, this scenario plays out all the time. We are humbled, frankly, by the number of people who have reached out with stories of using our data to help cop shoes or not get ripped off. And we are always quick to run a custom query for anyone who asks. But the interesting thing about the Kicks0l0gy story is not that we helped, but rather why the AM1 Liquid Pack was not on our price guide in the first place. The reason: it’s a women’s-only shoe. And this got us thinking . . .
At Campless, we currently we track 1162 sneakers on our site (and add more every day). Of those, 14 are women’s-only and 379 others have had sales in Youth or GS sizes. While this may or may not be a sufficient ratio for our Price Guide, the Kicks0l0gy experience made us realize that our blog is definitely not Title IX compliant. To date, there have been exactly zero blog posts or deep analyses about women’s kicks. That is changing right now . . . and will continue next week with Part Two . . .
In the meantime, please let us know if there are specific women’s sneaker analysis you’d like to see – we can always add another “part” to the series.
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