Today, we’ll take an early look at a few popular searches and see how they stack up across the different eBay sites. Of course, it’s important to always consider language barriers when conducting international searches (especially with regards to .de and .fr), but the following three examples should be popular and branded enough to apply to our purposes here.

Let’s start with a 90-day international search for “ipod nano“:

As we can see already, results for certain keywords can vary quite drastically from site to site. Just look at the discrepancy in average price and sell-through between Australia and Canada — those are pretty astonishing figures! And even though eBay.ca returns a reasonably small sample size, price and sell-through on the busier sites are also significantly up from those in Australia — certainly enough to warrant listing placement consideration!

Next, let’s look at the 5th-most popular eBay search, “wii“:

As a search term, “Wii” of course encompasses many different products — everything from consoles to games, to the smallest of accessories — but the sample size for this search is big enough to assume a reasonable level of balance across the board. And what can we conclude? Well, Germany seems like a good place for Wii sellers (highest average price by far, second-highest sell-through), while the UK (lowest prices, lowest sell-through) lags far behind.

Finally, let’s have a look at the “Twilight” phenomenon:

Judging by sell-through rates, there appears to be an especially-high demand for the books in both Australia and France (they’ve of course been translated), and reasonably consistent pricing (except in France) across the board.

That’s all for now, but expect  the blog to detail more examples of effective arbitrage in the future!