Scout Patch Collectors

Is Scouting on eBay healthy and growing?

I have read some experienced dealers lament the faults of eBay becoming the major marketplace for our hobby. I think there concerns are very well spoken and I have no idea where this is leading the hobby. I wanted just to throw out some figures to temp some posts from people who might have an opinion on the subject.

In the first part of January there was over 12,000 items sold in the Boy Scouts category of eBay. The average sold price was $18.23. This does not include another 2,000 items that were sold out of eBay Stores for an average selling price of $7.24.

The most popular day for starting and ending auctions is Sunday. The peak for listing in early January were both on Sundays with 1,545 items sold on 1-8 and 1,885 sold on 1-15.

If you carry this outlook over the last 90 days the numbers really add up. For auction listings there have been 87,385 sales from 190,135 closed listings. That is a sales rate for the entire category of 45%. On the store side the sales rate is only 28% with 11,239 sales out of over 40,000 completed listings.

This 90-day period included the holidays which is probably pulled them down a little. The top period for the category was the months immediately after the 2005 Jamboree. This would suggest to me that there must have been between 750k – 1 Million items listed in the Boy Scouts category last year. We all know that the category has been growing so that it stays above 10,000 current auctions consistently now.

So what does all this mean to our hobby? You decide…