Honestly, These are Some Great Deals

Do you ever wish that you had a personal shopper? You know – someone to do all the leg work for you: search for what you would like best, find out where the deals are, and get back to you with a list of what’s available and for how long? And with pictures, too?

And wouldn’t it be great if all of this were free?

Consider this your lucky day. I’ve got a personal shopper for all your eBay buying.

Honesty.com is an easy-to-use and free auction tool that will make shopping on eBay more efficient and even more fun.

The site is run by the folks at Andale.com, an auction management site. Andale charges sellers for its services – including research on pricing. With all that information at hand (and the chance to earn a small commission from eBay), Andale launched Honesty.com. This site makes sales information available to you, the buyer, free of charge. How do they do it? According to the Honesty.com website:

“Honesty takes historical information on eBay sales and analyzes it with our proprietary algorithms to identify:

• What is the range of prices for which items have sold?
• What is the statistical distribution of those prices?
• Which items currently on eBay are likely to sell successfully, and at what prices?
• Other proprietary data analysis we won't discuss because it's, well, proprietary. No one else does what we do!”

Let’s try an example. I’m always searching for Taxco jewelry – beautifully handcrafted silver from Mexico. First, I visit eBay and enter the search term “Taxco.” Today, the search returns more than 600 items. Yikes, that’s a lot of reviewing, even if I sort by price. Now, I jump over to Honesty.com and enter “Taxco” as a search term. Honesty.com has broken down my search into various categories, displaying the price range, and identifying the “bargain” threshold within that range. I can click on any category (Taxco brooch, signed Taxco, etc.) to find the average price, and bargains from both auction and store listings.

Using this auction tool is fun, easy and the price is right. You can even enter ISBN and UPC numbers or brand names. Honestly, it’s a great find!