ProBargainHunter.com

I wrote about eBay Pop last week, an eBay tool that shows you price trends on hot selling eBay items, a perfect solution when you need to check out what kind of merchandise sells well on eBay.

eBay Pop will work great for shoppers planning their next cell phone upgrade or looking for a hot selling book/CD, as well as for affiliates and resellers figuring out what kind of merchandise to sell next.

One of the comments to my post about eBay Pop tipped me to another tool which can help you solve a totally different problem by showing the same thing — what is hot on eBay. The name of the web site is bidThumbs and it is a flash application where you select from several categories and browse eBay auctions from each category lined up as rows of thumbnail images.

The difference between eBay Pop and bidThumbs is that while eBay Pop gives you a very high level historical data, bidThumbs brings you down to individual items and lets you see those that generate most buzz.

bidThumbs only shows auctions that end within 24 hours and from these only the items without reserve price (or with already satisfied reserve price requirement) are displayed. This is a very good filter. First, I usually don’t look at the auctions ending in several days, unless they have a Buy Now option. Second, many auctions end without ever reaching the reserve price and if 24 hours is all that left and the reserve is not met, there is a good chance the auction will not complete and the item will be re-listed.

My understanding is that the number of bids is the ultimate indicator of how hot the auction is and while I didn’t notice any particular order as to how the items are listed, there is not that many items displayed for this to present any sort of inconvenience.

I am not sure about how useful the tool is for bargain hunting since hot selling items are not necessarily the ones that have good value (in fact it works the opposite way more often) however the tool certainly has some use, for me personally it was an educational kind. I have discovered that vintage Siemens tubes are in hot demand (need to check my grandma’s attic ;-) ) and that 1000 US$ bills can cost more than 2000 US dollars!