The Best Online eBay Price Guides And Tools For Video Games

What is competitive pricing?

[caption id="attachment_468" align="alignleft" width="300"] Never Under Price Your Rare Games Again[/caption]

In short competitive pricing is pricing your item such that it's price is near that of others on the open market.  A competitive pricing strategy assures that your items will be either lower priced than your competitors or about the same. The goal is to not price your item to high and lose out on sales but also not to price it too low and leave money on the table. If a item is rare or is not seen that often on eBay it can be hard to determine what price to sell it at. For example when I was quite a bit younger my dad was getting rid of all his old TI-994A cartridges and extras that he had collected over the years. He gave them to me to sell on eBay. Not knowing the price I put two unopened games in great condition on eBay for about $49.99. Those two games sold within minutes and I realized I had made a big mistake and had priced them way too low (similar ones later went in auction for $150). The point being don't sell anything unless you know how much it's worth. Sometimes you just have to pay a price to learn a lesson I guess. Fortunately, though there are some great free resources out there that can help you price just about any game in any condition.

1. www.pricecharting.com is a online resource that tracks the new and used sell prices of new and classic video games. It combines sales data from eBay with listing data from Amazon and Half.com to determine the going price of thousands of video games and consoles. What's even better is that they collect data trends on each game and categories of games so you can easily see which systems are on the rise and which are becoming obsolete.


2. www.rarityguide.com is one of the most trusted collectible game pricing guides. The site is very useful if you have a very rare NIB item or a CIB item that you just don't know how to price. The only flaw with this site is that all the prices are for items in collectible condition and it doesn't really address the price of an average loose cartridge or CD.


3. Terapeak's Keyword Tool is not only useful for finding the best keywords to put in a title but can also help you price items as well. It helps to be as specific as possible and remember that this tool uses keywords not actual titles so sometimes that can throw things off a bit. For example if you put in a keyword from a series of games then you'll get the average from all the games from that series.


4. eBay Market Analyzer is a great new free app for eBay that searches past listings and displays how many items sold and for how much. Again you have to be specific and you should probably sort by items sold. The more items sold at a certain price the more reliable that pricing information is going to be. You can also sort by "eBay Score" but I'm not quite sure how that is even calculated. This tool can also be used to find which video games and lots are most popular by using the most watched option.

For more complete market package I recommend checking out eBay Market Research by Terapeak. Learn more about features and pricing in our Terapeak Review.