eBay opinion counsel - price evaluation tool

[Snapolit1]

Some time ago I was invited to be on some eBay opinion counsel of card purchasers. Not the most exciting invitation I have ever received, but what the hell Occasionally they send me a short questionnaire on card selling/buying issues. Harmless distraction.

One this week was sort of interesting. Asking how I value asking prices on eBay, what I look for on past sales, trends, etc. How I run my searches. It sounds like eBay is playing with the idea of some tool that you can click on that would immediately give you a summary of trending of prices and how reasonable a particular price is vis-a-vis recent eBay transactions. Not telling you anything you can't figure out with minimal detective work, but I wonder how such a simple to use system would impact the PWCC's and the Probstein's of the world, where you click on a little button and a red traffic light appears (I'm making that up) and you basically are told the current price is like 22% higher that a sale last month. Not a game changer but I thought kind of interesting. They didn't give many details of what they might be considering.

Ebay was also asking me what other sources I use (VCP, Google, auction websites) and whether I would continue using them if such a service was offered by eBay (of course).

Hell, maybe I'll be kicked off now for revealing state secrets.

[AGuinness]

I doubt a tool like that would have much of an impact on the sellers you mention by name; as you note, much of the information is already easy enough to find and those two sellers in particular (although not limited to them) have a strong enough following that I don't think the red traffic light (great idea) would sway them. They keep getting high prices despite the scandals of the past few years, a warning from an eBay tool won't do much.
And in general for cards, particularly graded examples, a limited number of data points on recent sales might not really have much correlation to another card of the same variety at auction, due to the variety of elements at play that make up a card's presentation.
That said, if the potential eBay tool could offer a link to a sales history that is narrowed enough to match the card for sale, I think that would be handy instead of going through the search myself and clicking on all the options. But the tool would have to be reliable enough that I wasn't skimming through a bunch of cards at other grades, for example.