I am looking to build an ecommerce site which buys used electronics, however, I face a problem because the products are old we ask the customer a series of question based on the size, condition, accessories included, etc. do predict a price for the item. After they enter the questions a price calculator gives the customer an offer that they can accept or deny. I know it is possible to manually enter the prices but for a large database this would be very time consuming. Is there any type of API or software that can calculate prices based on the product’s condition, longevity (depreciation), supply and demand of economic trends, so basically the market price for retailers. I know this website gazelle dot com uses it but how? Any ideas would be greatly appreciated and I will pay money to have this project completed, thanks. Also if you think I am new and incredible please check me out on digital point forums with the same username I have a good reputation so I am serious about this.
How do you know gazelle uses something like that, and isn’t maintaining a price database of their own? It may be a large amount of work, for which they have full time employees dedicated, but it seems that relying on any type of automated means could leave you seriously unprofitable. Any type of use of store pricing, auction pricing, or any other type of data you can mine isn’t necessary reflective of the market price for an item but only seller asking prices. It doesn’t tell you whether people are buying at those prices, or anything about how the prices vary by condition. Even with perfect prediction, your database still needs to take into account your business’s ability to move different types of products. You don’t want to pay top price for something you know you have a hard time selling, or accept low margin offers on large quantities of expensive goods when you could use that money to pay for what you know your company can earn a higher margin reselling.
I guess I never really thought about it that way, they don’t seem to have that many employees but perhaps they do do it manually. How would one be able to find out anyways?
It looks like they have about 60 employees. That seems like a pretty sizable operation to me.
Yes, well I thought for a multi million dollar business it would have more. I mean they do have well over thousands of products, updating those daily would be a large amount of work…but maybe they do it with 60 employees, who knows.
Once you have an active resale business going, you have your own internal sales data to use to update pricing. It doesn’t all have to be manual, but the data isn’t coming from the outside either. The only way you’ll get to that point yourself, though, is to start small and figure out the pricing and channels to move the goods on your own at first.