ProBargainHunter.com

You might remember my blog post about eBay Pop, the online tool for monitoring what is hot on eBay. Mpire, the team that built the tool, has decided to open up this functionality for every webmaster and blogger to use on their website/blog as a widget.

In fact Mipre is launching today not one but four different widgets, each offering distinct features. The announcement comes hot after eBay itself launched eBay To Go last week, which is their own set of widgets designed to assist sellers in promoting their eBay auctions.

How are these widgets different from what eBay offers?

While eBay To Go is mostly built around a single eBay auction, Mpire weighs in by offering widgets featuring shopping data analysis that Mpire is so good at. Here is a short summary of what each of Mpire widgets does:

• eBay Movers and Shakers shows what people are selling/buying on eBay. This is exactly what eBay Pop does however the widget shows only one pre-configured category.
• eBay Top Searches shows what people are searching on eBay. A product category is selected when widget is configured. The widget will display up to 10 popular search terms from that category.
• Mpire Price Check displays a price chart for a pre-configured set of products. The widget allows up to 6 product picks and for each product will display a price chart over the past month together with data on average selling price and number of matching results.
• Mpire Trend Watch displays the price trend for a product category. This widget appears to be similar to the Movers tab of “eBay Movers and Shakers” except it also shows the average new and used price for the product.

The most functionally diverse offering of shopping widgets ever

I have been testing Mpire widgets over the past week and I am really impressed. So far this is the most functionally diverse offering of shopping widgets I have ever seen.

All Mpire widgets work of eBay and Amazon database of products to display the lists/charts. In addition to the main functionality, each widget also has a configurable list of product picks which is a set of links that open a separate browser window with product search results for the selected search term. You can see how this works from the widget I embedded at the bottom of this blog post.

Since I am a stats/analysis freak myself, I can truly appreciate these widgets for what they offer. In fact I am adding the “Price Check” widget to my blog sidebar to help me with tracking prices on a couple of things I am planning to buy.

Webmasters receive 100% of the commission from sales

One more significant difference between Mpire and eBay widgets is that with Mpire publishers can enter their eBay and/or Amazon affiliate code when they configure a widget and then receive a commission from each sale that the widget generates. Mpire doesn’t hold anything back, the entire commission goes to the publisher.

Why are they doing it? There are several reasons. One is probably the fact that Amazon doesn’t support revenue sharing and unless Mpire drops Amazon from this offering, they really don’t have much choice. The other reason is that these widgets are a very good way for Mpire to promote their main website, which is a far more convenient place to shop than the widget itself. And if the visitor leaves your blog for the Mpire site, the team will get all the revenue.

And finally, I am sure eBay is already working on adding affiliate codes to their widgets (if they already don’t have this functionality) and it is probably just a matter of time before this happens. By offering affiliate incentive now, Mpire takes the lead and uses it as an advantage in this difficult competition against such a heavy lifter as eBay.

Conclusion

Mpire widgets is a very strong and functionally rich offering that will enhance many shopping related websites/blogs and will bring additional revenue to the owners. Setting up a widget doesn’t require registration which is also a plus. In addition, the widgets are an excellent branding tool for Mpire to promote their main website. I will be curious to see how this offering affects Mpire ranking in my monthly list of popular price comparison websites.

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!