Nowadays, information about prices and assortment is more transparent than ever before. Customers can compare prices easily on different online stores’ websites, on marketplaces and price comparison websites. According to the research, as many as 80% of online shoppers compare prices online before shopping. Two of the most popular e-commerce platforms are Amazon and eBay. With the usage of the Dealavo tool for price tracking, we have analyzed prices of more than 6500 products to answer the question: where can customers find the best offers?
Why do customers compare prices on Amazon?
Several customers decide to compare products on Amazon since many online sellers promote their offer on this platform. Since a low price is one of the key factors to have a shop’s offer included in the Buy Box and, hence, significantly increase the chance to be chosen by the customers, several online shops decide to promote especially attractive offers. And there are plenty of them – more than 353 million, according to 360pi.
What’s more, Amazon is widely available – it operates in 17 markets, so customers that want to make a truly important purchase can even check whether they can find a better offer in another country.
These are just some of the reasons why customers choose Amazon to check the prices and purchase on Amazon. And there are many that do. There are more than 200 million visitors on Amazon monthly, according to Statista. What’s more, 9 out of 10 consumers price check a product on Amazon, according to CNBC.
Why do customers compare prices on eBay?
eBay is another extremely popular e-commerce platform. It is a marketplace which attracts more than 182 million users worldwide, especially when they look for electronic products. The platform includes 1.3 billion listings which means that there is a huge range of products that customers can choose from. What’s more, it means that there are many competing offers, and competition in the case of this marketplace is often about the price. Customers can look for attractive offers, especially since more than 70% of purchases on eBay are shipped for free.
The difference between eBay and Amazon is that the former originates from C2C. Hence, you can find more offers from private sellers whose offers are sometimes more attractive.
Where can customers find the best offers?
Since checking prices of products both on Amazon and eBay is popular among customers, we decided to check where they can usually find more attractive offers. We compared prices of 6509 products on Amazon and eBay in the US and Germany to answer this question. Data was analyzed with the Dealavo tool for price monitoring. What are the results?
It turns out that in 43% of cases the lowest price is the same on those 2 platforms. It means that regardless of whether a customer searches for the product on Amazon or eBay, he can find the same low offer on both platforms.
However, in as many as 40% of cases (2617 products), the lowest price can be found on eBay. Amazon turns out to be more attractive only in 17% of cases.
What happens if we look at the average, and not the lowest price in a listing for a specific product? It might be useful information since sometimes the cheapest offers are promoted by sellers that don’t seem to be trustworthy. It turns out that in this case it is Amazon that offers lower average prices in 53% of cases. The difference, however, is not that significant.
The other factor that customers can take into account, is the average number of sellers that offer a specific product. For many purchasers, the bigger choice, the better – it allows them to choose the one that offers the most suitable conditions.
We have compared the competition for each of the 6509 products and checked how often there are more offers in a specific listing for each of the products. What have we found out?
It turns out that in 52% of cases (3385 products), there are more offers in the listing on eBay than on Amazon. For 38% of products, more sellers decide to offer the product on Amazon and in 10% – the number of competing sellers is the same.
Customers shopping online – should they choose Amazon or eBay?
Even though both of the platforms, Amazon and eBay, are relevant sources of information about products and their prices, it seems that customers can find more offers and at lower prices at eBay than Amazon. However, if time allows, it might be worth checking product information on both platforms.