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Adventures in Aeron Chair Arbitrage

blog.priceonomics.com

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Re: Adventures in Aeron Chair Arbitrage

#51

Post by quanticle »

fanboy123 wrote: post #29
zecho wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. It's a hobby, but while scaling it up is hard to do, it is not impossible. Two stories. I wrote a program awhile back that would look for iPod Touches on my local Craigslist and would analyze the price for many different versions. If an individual iPod was available and was below mean price within a given time frame, I'd send the seller a note almost immediately. Then, if I purchased the item, I'd relist it…

Arbitrage is technically a set of simultaneous transactions where you buy and sell at the same time. Purchasing something and reselling it later for a higher price is not arbitrage. It is usually used to describe a riskless transaction.

I'm not sure I agree with the description of arbitrage as "riskless". The arbitrageur is accepting the risk that the arbitrage opportunity will go away in between the buy and the sell. This is true whether you're arbitraging salt via caravans across the Sahara or arbitraging currencies in millisecond trades.

Re: Adventures in Aeron Chair Arbitrage

#52

Post by makmanalp »

zecho wrote: post #22
callmeed wrote: post #14

Did you really think arbitrage of used goods could be a business? I think the best thing these types of experiments do is expose pain points and inefficiencies that you can make businesses out of. When I was in my ramen phase of startup life (and newly married), I used to (among other things) buy clothes at local thrift stores and resell them on eBay for a decent margin. You quickly learn what brands/items sell and o…

Exactly. It's a hobby, but while scaling it up is hard to do, it is not impossible. Two stories. I wrote a program awhile back that would look for iPod Touches on my local Craigslist and would analyze the price for many different versions. If an individual iPod was available and was below mean price within a given time frame, I'd send the seller a note almost immediately. Then, if I purchased the item, I'd relist it…

> 2) People who buy on craigslist are flaky and tend not to show up, 3) The time spent waiting around to meet people was obnoxious, and 4) Sometimes sellers see what you did with their item and send you angry emails.

This is why you buy in the small and isolated market (craigslist) and then sell in the larger market (ebay) where you don't have to find people and waste time and money delivering the item to the person.

Re: Adventures in Aeron Chair Arbitrage

#53

Post by codenerdz »

nlh wrote: post #27
codenerdz wrote: post #11

I still dont get what priceonomics provides that craigslist or ebay doesnt. Craigslist: * Listings have "ASKING" prices and can easily negotiated down 5-20%. So even if you provide a historical information of "Asking Prices", its still not a 1-1 relationship to how much you expect to sell your item for or its "BUYING" price * I do question the value of historical information on CL: Its never been available, therefore…

You sort of answered your own question -- in both examples you specifically pointed out work that you have to do in order to calculate a price -- you need to sift through Craigslist items, keep track of what you find, apply a calculation, and come up with an estimate. Same for eBay. The work you're doing there takes time and has value, and Pricenomics is trying to capture that. I'm not intimately familiar with the co…

effort wise, it looks like search craigslist == search pricenomics, with craigslist being smart enough to limit my last search to the geographical area where I last searched, whereas pricenomics showed me the results around the country(with option to filter it down to location later).

All things being equal, the effort is the same in my opinion

Re: Adventures in Aeron Chair Arbitrage

#54

Post by mapster »

parfe wrote: post #12
wycats wrote: post #3

It's worth noting that $300 for a day of manual work is considered a good salary in many parts of the country (and even in San Francisco).

$300 for three guys. Once you factor in the girlfriend subsidy, they would have made better money with far less risk by getting shifts at local fast food restaurants.

its a proof of concept. through iterations the business can grow. I think this first painful experience is how many large retailers or wholesalers got established.

Re: Adventures in Aeron Chair Arbitrage

#56

Post by the_cat_kittles »

The most fun I've had doing this sort of thing is going to goodwill outlets (aka "the bins" ...of crap) and looking for stuff to flip. You pay by the pound, and the more you buy, the better the per pound rate. And your helping out goodwill with landfill costs. And your reusing something that would otherwise be trash. Everyone wins!

You would be astounded at what you can find there... things worth well over 100 dollars show up regularly.

Re: Adventures in Aeron Chair Arbitrage

#57

Post by chrisaycock »

fanboy123 wrote: post #29
zecho wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. It's a hobby, but while scaling it up is hard to do, it is not impossible. Two stories. I wrote a program awhile back that would look for iPod Touches on my local Craigslist and would analyze the price for many different versions. If an individual iPod was available and was below mean price within a given time frame, I'd send the seller a note almost immediately. Then, if I purchased the item, I'd relist it…

Arbitrage is technically a set of simultaneous transactions where you buy and sell at the same time. Purchasing something and reselling it later for a higher price is not arbitrage. It is usually used to describe a riskless transaction.

> Purchasing something and reselling it later for a higher price is not arbitrage.

Correct. It's called, "market making".

Re: Adventures in Aeron Chair Arbitrage

#58

Post by the_cat_kittles »

brador wrote: post #9

Any news from craigslist RE:bot policy update? That low altitude you're flying at can only keep you off radar for so long and you're building your entire business on shaky ground.

cl updates every 15 minutes, its pretty much useless to scrape continually. If you really need to be first to the info, just scrape for a window on either side of when it updates I guess...

Re: Adventures in Aeron Chair Arbitrage

#59

Post by binarysolo »

binarysolo wrote: post #37

As a fellow data scientist and former Craigslist/eBay item flipper and deal site (SlickDeals, FatWallet) hobbyist, my tidbit of experience and Sidebusiness 101: profit comes when sellers don't care to maximize due to circumstance. Those circumstances include lack of product knowledge, urgency to move item, and value for their own time/convenience. For the first problem, people have tackled it with eBay/Craigslist lis…

Seems like I missed the edit deadline. More free advice: Most flippers derive market price by using pre-existing marketplaces data like eBay/Terapeak and Amazon new/used to figure out where the market roughly sits. These venues have strong incentives to regulate listings into consistent item buckets to make sure people can't (CL)SEO listings like CL spammers ("2011 Macbook Pro" vs "2006 Macbook Pro with Office 2011", or the giant paragraph of hot items in small text and white font to catch your search attention). Once you get that magical price point/band, you can pretty much go to town with some basic clustering analysis. [Disclaimer: worked on a few private, weekend projects in this specific niche.]

Re: Adventures in Aeron Chair Arbitrage

#60

Post by zem »

zecho wrote: post #22
callmeed wrote: post #14

Did you really think arbitrage of used goods could be a business? I think the best thing these types of experiments do is expose pain points and inefficiencies that you can make businesses out of. When I was in my ramen phase of startup life (and newly married), I used to (among other things) buy clothes at local thrift stores and resell them on eBay for a decent margin. You quickly learn what brands/items sell and o…

Exactly. It's a hobby, but while scaling it up is hard to do, it is not impossible. Two stories. I wrote a program awhile back that would look for iPod Touches on my local Craigslist and would analyze the price for many different versions. If an individual iPod was available and was below mean price within a given time frame, I'd send the seller a note almost immediately. Then, if I purchased the item, I'd relist it…

angry emails saying what exactly?
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