Dear All,
Bill Blackhurst started a thread called 'What If...' a bit more than a week ago (here:
http://www.playmofriends.com/forum/index.php?topic=4527.0), exploring some of the possibilities and dreams some of us have regarding an official Playmobil collectors club and what that could mean.
One of the things that came up, as it has in other threads, is how we might strengthen the arguments we, as a collector/enthusiast community, make to Playmobil's management. I made a couple of suggestions (here:
http://www.playmofriends.com/forum/index.php?topic=4527.msg58842#msg58842). As others have said (on more than one occasion), having some numbers describing the amounts of money spent on Playmobil
could be useful. If you read through the whole of that thread, you will see that there was some discussion and debate as to how this might be done, and some very quick-and-dirty statistics.
Well, what I'd like to do in this new thread is present some slightly more detailed figures. These numbers are, in my opinion, still preliminary, but I think they are still interesting and perhaps useful. I also wanted to get this information and discussion out where more people might see it -- I think it's a bit 'buried' where it is at the moment.
What I did was search for 'Playmobil' on EBay UK, but only for completed items (look under 'Advanced Search', and part of the way down the list of options there's a tick box for 'Completed Items'). This search gives all the items that were listed meeting the search criteria, but were completed in the last 3 weeks. I copied and pasted all the rows from the webpages for the period 14 May 23:59 back to 8 May 00:00 (a whole week) into an Excel spreadsheet, did a lot of editing to get rid of all the extraneous blank lines, unnecessary information and so on.
There were a total of 3,995 items listed, of which 2,637 sold (66%). The total value of the items sold was
£22,894.54. So the average value
per item sold was
£8.68; the average value per item
for all items listed (both sold and unsold) was
£5.73. So far, so good.
I repeated the same exercise for EBay Germany (Ebay.de), but I had to limit myself just to sales yesterday (15th May 2010). There were
3,851 Playmobil items just on
one day -- this gives an impression of the difference in volume between just UK and Germany! Of the 3851 items listed, 1745 sold (45%). The total value of all the items sold was
€18,871.44 (remember, this is just
one day 
, albeit a Saturday). So the average value
per item sold was
€10.81; the average value per item
for all items listed (both sold and unsold) was
€4.90.
So what might this all mean? Well, first off, please don't read too much into the apparent precision of my numbers. The method by which I gathered and manipulated the raw data is not without potential for error. But allowing for that, I think the guesstimate of an average value of
€5 that chacalote came up with here (
http://www.playmofriends.com/forum/index.php?topic=4527.msg58913#msg58913) is probably pretty near the mark for an average value per Playmobil item listed on Ebay (at least in the UK and Germany). Without doing the same thing I did (which is, frankly, a lot of work), we can't tell how many items actually sell on Ebay, or their total value. But that €5 average does give us something we could work with.
So, I think chacalote's suggestion about tracking the number of items listed day by day on each of the regional Ebay sites could give us some rough numbers of the overall volume of second-hand items sold, and then use the €5 multiplier to calculate the value. I don't know what the outcome of that might be, but I'd like to find out
.
Of course, what would be best would be if we could easily pick out items that are the sorts of things we collectors/enthusiasts would like to see Playmobil reissue, or otherwise make easier to obtain directly from them. There is, so far as I can see, no
easy way to do this. I can try to burrow through the spreadsheets I have now created to try to get some more data out about what types of items sell for the highest prices, but this will probably have to wait. We will be moving house soon, and so most of my time and energy outside work will be directed toward packing and organising, not monitoring Ebay
. And if anyone would likes copies of the spreadsheets, I'd be more than happy to supply them.
Anyway, I hope this is all of interest to some...
Cheers,
AndrewL
