I'm a long time user of eBay both as as seller, buyer and affiliate so, like many people, I am aware of the upsides and downsides of eBay.
Selling can be a painful process, dealing with all the users that message asking for buy it now prices no matter how many times the listing says the auction will run to it's end. Once the item is sold we have to hope that our auction winner will actually stump up the money or collect the goods and then there's the trepidacious wait for feedback.
As a buyer the site can be hard to navigate. Thousands of listings compete for our attention and it can be very difficult to see the wood for the trees. Filter and sortation methods don't always provide buyers with the view they need to make informed choices and many will give up before finding that bargain or that perfect item that often is there, just can't be found.
Sellers naturally want their listings to be high in the rankings and with eBay taking payment for improved positioning in results alongside a 'relevance' based algorithm dictating initial results shoppers see the first page of results often doesn't contain the best value listings. Add to this the fact that sellers are aware of the effect of having the 'cheapest listing' when buyers use the 'sort by price' feature to try to find the bargains. Savvy sellers will ensure they have a low price variation of the product for sale, often at 99p, but this will typically be sample size.
Many years ago I found an eBay niche related to furniture. The popular British retailer Marks & Spencer would sell it's slight seconds and cancelled customer orders to companies such as Our Sofa House that would then sell these products on eBay. At the time many people shopping for M&S furniture online wouldn't thnk to look on eBay. This was my introduction to working as an eBay affiliate by pointing buyers searching for M&S furniture to these sellers. I learned to use eBay's API service and created a site that featured the products for sale and earned a small commission each time I helped connect buyer and seller.
As eBay has continued to become increasingly dominated by professional sellers running large retail operations its has become a place to buy everyday items as well as the secondhand bargains that made it's name two decades ago. As a frugal shopper always keen to find the best cost per unit I have always compared prices for the items I am shopping for in various places and always keep in mind cashback and shipping as contributing factors to overall price I end up paying. Comparing Amazon to eBay I have often found that eBay is slightly cheaper on a price per unit basis and I will be writing several case studies on comparable pricing between the two sites in future.
As I found myself buying more and more commodity type products on eBay I became increasingly frustrated by the fact that there were thousands of listings, each with variations for colour, flavour, quantity, weight, material etc but with no clear way of establishing a cost per unit. For all the reasons previously mentioned I knew I wasn't necessarily seeing the best prices on offer and the knowledge that I would never know began to drive me crazy! Listings often mention a price per unit but this typically only applies to one of the many variations available for sale, is often inaccurate and isn't available on all listings. There is also not sortation feature for this value so it's useless anyway unless you are willing to look at every one of thousands of listings noting down the item id and cost per unit for each. Who has time for that?
When the time came to buy some chicken wire for a vegetable garden I was trying to protect from rabbits I decided to invest the time to see if I could solve the challenge of finding the best price on eBay per linear metre. I had to dust off the eBay API documentation and familiarise myself again with their inconsistent methods of implementing the different calls I would need to make to gather all the listings for chicken wire, extract from their descriptions or variations the size on offer and calculate a price per metre before sorting by this number. The result was this page which I used to buy myself a bargain. Buoyed by this success I went on to create new pages every time I needed to buy a product sold by weight, length, count, volume etc.
After having built several pages for all sorts of products such as shower gel, toothpaste, dog food and laundry detergent I decided to publish my findings and provide links to the listings using my eBay affiliate account. To give peole searching for the best price per kilo or price per litre the maxmium choice I have included on each product page the top thousand listings by price per unit sorted with the cheapest first. A filter field allows users to search for brands, colours, flavours etc as the cheapest item is often a bulk pack on a relatively obscure brand or an unbranded product. In a separate article I provide a full 'how to' on using the product pages to find the lowest price per unit for the specific product you are searching for.
I hope that I can help as many people as possible find the lowest prices per metre, litre, kilo and piece while earning myself a little pocket money for my efforts in creating the software that provides this eBay shopping assistance.