Another interesting item from OutsellInc‘s excellent weekly e-mail newsletter: “About two years ago we predicted that open Web venues that handle millions of transactions
would enter the content business as valuable new sources of market data. eBay is proving
us right. It has started to sell pricing data on commonly sold items at its auction site.
The sales data is typically used to determine the fair market value of goods. For
example, Intuit is using eBay data to help its tax-filing-software customers to put a
value on items they donate to obtain a tax deduction. Some pricing guides, such as the
Kelley Blue Book for autos, are entrenched and have a lock on pricing data for certain
goods, but eBay’s advantage is the incredible diversity of products that it carries.
Transactional sites with more focused products will have more vertically oriented data
with more limited markets, but virtually any online retailer is a potential entrant in the
market research industry. Most of them are sitting on data goldmines that just need the
right mindset and will to commercialize them. “
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