Watchroll update

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akirk
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Watchroll update

Post by akirk »

A brief post to note that we have recently updated the watchroll website:
http://www.watchroll.com

For those who don't know it, this website was set up c. 4 years ago (but has data for 5 nearly 6 years) as the result of a conversation on this forum about the effort needed to record ebay sales in the forum as a record of prices - I thought there might be an easier way, so wrote a website to talk every hour to every ebay website and find out what is on sale / what has sold / what has failed to sell - and the prices are recorded with a currency conversion for that day...

The old website was thrown together and was clunky and slow, we have now updated it:
- mobile responsive
- simpler
- better understanding of figures
- some stuff gone
- some stuff added...

Speed
there will always be some speed issues as it crunches a lot of data, we hit 22 ebay websites internationally once an hour - so 528 hits a day - and we check every live sale each time so return to every site each time to query the inidividual items - it can be thousand of hits a day, a lot of data is recorded... we have though streamlined and made the database more efficient, and in some places where we don't need to present all the data, we have focused the data more to reduce loading times - the live sales page and the finished page will always take a bit of time to load, but should now be quicker, and once loaded you can do some filtering etc. without reloading the page.

Mobile friendly
the old site was always thrown together and never had any design input... We have moved to a responsive template so that the website is mobile and tablet friendly and hopefully that makes it easier to use...

Simpler
This may be the most contentious change - we no longer present every sale to browse through - we now have approaching 8,000 items recorded and showing them all means that when search engines trawl the site we are hit quite hard... Equally that becomes too many for humans to want to scroll through, so now we present the last month or year, or sets of information - enough to give an understanding of pricing, and then use graphs to show trends etc.

Figures
In the early days of the website, we showed some trend graphs, but they really slowed down the page loading, so we removed them - however I think that they are one of the more interesting parts of looking at sales data - we want to understand trends / averages / etc. So we have brought them back, and as new coding / graphing libraries have become available, so it is easier for us to do this in a more usable fashion...

We have updated the finished sales section to now show the last year's price trends, and the last month's sales (sold & unsold). This is the starting point, but using the search box you can filter by search term, so a search on C60 for example will show a filtered view for the last year, showing the trend for the average sale price for a C60:

Image

As you can see from this - on average, prices are going up for C60s on ebay :) (average of sold prices)
You also see the last 20 sales to give a few more examples. You can also filter to show a graph of actual sales prices in that period, and then you can statistically remove outliers to show the 75% / 50% / 25% sets - and for each it tells you the max / min / average prices, and when removing outliers, it tells you the prices it has removed...

We have chosen to only show prices from the last year because generally prices go out of date, so it is more useful to see more recent data - plus it speeds up the processing of the information... It is also worth noting that we don't manually tag sales, so it is based on a soft search depending on how items are labelled, and inaccuracies will turn up (hence ability to remove outliers - a strap for a C60 would otherwise alter the stats you want for the watch...)

Price Index
A new feature now live is a price index... We have chosen certain items and at the end of every month our system analyses sales that are linked to that item - we then save the average price and compare it to previous months - those items are then shown in three simple sets: gone up in value / stayed the same / gone down in value... This is only our initial work on this, we need to look further at how we develop it, so all ideas welcome... again, this is about presenting simple concepts clearly - the search terms are taken from our records of all 60,000+ searches on the website...

Articles
These are still here, but presented differently - shown with the latest at the top, and a simple filtering system, we feel this is easier to use - again, other suggestions always welcome...

Videos
A new section - we have curated over 160 videos from youtube, and link to them, with the ability to play from the website, or go to youtube - they take a long time to load, so we present a random 12 each time the page is refreshed - we are of course looking at other ways of presenting this information to make it easier to load / use...

Map
This remains the same - for security the locations are still fudged and you can't zoom right in - but shows sales trends...

Removed
For now we have removed the gallery of photos and 360 degree spins - if there is a demand for them we will look at when they go back in - done for expediency, and the plan is to reinstate them in time...

Hopefully this is a useful update - if nothing else it is a little more pleasing on the eye :)
For interest - in the last c. 5 years, we have averaged c. 250,000 page views a year, and c. 25,000 visitors, had over 18,000 wallpapers (large photos) downloaded, and over 40,000 articles read (on 3rd party websites, sent by us) and we have sent thousands of visitors to both ebay to view watches for sale, and indeed a similar number to the CWL shop to look at new watches...

please do feed back through this thread (I don't have much time for contributing on here at present, but do read the forum regularly), or directly to me... We have made the changes based on our perception of how the website is used (taken from our logs), but you may have a different view, so hopefully that can help us get right what we do with the website...

anyway - Watchroll v2.0 is now launched!

Alasdair

(apologies - ended up not being a brief post - but hopefully useful)
Tracking Christopher Ward watch prices on ebay globally at Watchroll
Tracking Bremont watch prices on ebay globally at Watchtrace
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Re: Watchroll update

Post by Kip »

Well done Aalasdair. :thumbup:

As I have already made my observations to you privately, I will not repeat them here. As I am a frequent visitor to Watchroll I do think the improvements are excellent. The addition of the videos are a very nice plus as well as the trending stats.
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Re: Watchroll update

Post by yuri9206 »

Hello Akirk,
many compliments for the site.
Interesting watch data, great CW archive.
One question: one e Bay auction (item 172349256623) was ended last monday with one bid at 749 £ GB pounds starting price. It was a C11 extreme on sale that I watched. I think it was an high price for eBay and an important data for C11 extreme (sold here in the forum for 500 £ and for 450 £ some weeks ago). Why your site registered a different price, 648,65 £ GB pounds? It's a mistake?
The day after a C11 Makaira blue ended at 470 £ GB pounds with 8 bids. This data is reported correct in your site. Same is for other auctions ended last days, all C60, C65, C11, C70 and C9 auctions that I'm look for, as C70 quartz sold at 291 £, etc.
So, monday C11 extreme wrong data it's a rare case?
Thanks for answer

PS. Anyway I think C11 data (657.79 £, arrow down) in "Price Index" is not real in according to last eBay auction ended at 749 £. I'm too much accurate?
C8 Pilot MK II; C5 Malvern MK II; C60 Trident Pro 600 black; C11 Titanium Extreme 1000; C65 Trident Classic LE; C60 Trident Titanium Pro 600 #2; C60 Trident Pro 600 white; C11 MSL Black Manta; C11 Titanium Elite 500; C8 Mark I; C11 Makaira pro 500 orange
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Re: Watchroll update

Post by akirk »

Hi Yuri, thank you for looking and commenting...
we use the data fed to us by the ebay API - which is not always the same that you see looking at ebay - especially if an offer is made on an item, ebay can show the original selling price, but we get the actual purchased price...
for this item, the api was telling us that the item was sold for 749 euros not sterling (item is based in Italy), which would make the sterling conversion £648.65 - the ebay website is saying sterling... the item was also up as bid or offer - sometimes when that happens, the sale is made through an offer, but the offer amount is not shown to you on ebay - however we see it, so we get more accurate information...

I will check it though...

regards

Alasdair
Tracking Christopher Ward watch prices on ebay globally at Watchroll
Tracking Bremont watch prices on ebay globally at Watchtrace
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Re: Watchroll update

Post by scooter »

Thank you for taking the time and effort to do this.

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asqwerth
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Re: Watchroll update

Post by asqwerth »

You're alive!


On a more serious note, good job, Alasdair!
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Re: Watchroll update

Post by yuri9206 »

Hello again Akirk. It's unbelieved but that item was sold by a friend of mine. So I'm sure of all...
He put the auction from Italy into eBay.uk in £ GB pounds and sold item for 749.99 £ GB pounds = 868 euro, at first buyer. It's enough to see the seller ended auctions to see it. So I don't understand well all explanation about eBay API...
But it is not important.
Your database and all your work is fantastic. Again compliments!
C8 Pilot MK II; C5 Malvern MK II; C60 Trident Pro 600 black; C11 Titanium Extreme 1000; C65 Trident Classic LE; C60 Trident Titanium Pro 600 #2; C60 Trident Pro 600 white; C11 MSL Black Manta; C11 Titanium Elite 500; C8 Mark I; C11 Makaira pro 500 orange
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Re: Watchroll update

Post by PaulWB »

Alasdair,

Good to hear about your updates to Watchroll - I have always found it to be a very useful source of information on CWL watches.

You make a good point about eBay showing the correct prices. As you know, Ferg and I do the the eBay listings and I find that sometimes eBay crosses out the BIN or MAO price when there has been an offer (but it often doesn't). Like Ferg, I use Watchcount.com which will show you all the information on bids if you enter the item number.

It's good to see that you take the api information with the correct price.

Paul
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Re: Watchroll update

Post by tempusmaximus »

A very informative site on CW watches Alasdair , well done :clap:
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akirk
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Re: Watchroll update

Post by akirk »

yuri9206 wrote:Hello again Akirk. It's unbelieved but that item was sold by a friend of mine. So I'm sure of all...
He put the auction from Italy into eBay.uk in £ GB pounds and sold item for 749.99 £ GB pounds = 868 euro, at first buyer. It's enough to see the seller ended auctions to see it. So I don't understand well all explanation about eBay API...
But it is not important.
Your database and all your work is fantastic. Again compliments!
Hi Yuri,
thank you - that is helpful I have corrected the database...
the finished price that you see on ebay (if you are not the seller or buyer) is not always accurate...
especially if someone makes an offer when ebay will often show the sold price as the price originally set by the seller, not the price seller and buyer agree... The api is normally accurate so we will often have a more accurate price on watchroll than someone browsing can see on ebay...
in this case, the api gave us the correct price, but in error said it was euros not GBP, so our currency conversion changed it back to GBP at a lower amount... I have updated it to GBP in the database and re-run the currency conversion to give an accurate result...

in your first post you asked whether the price index is therefore wrong - no, the price index is run at the end of each month, this sale is in September, the price index is still as of the end of August... (it looks at the monthly average...) it should update this weekend...

regards

Alasdair
Tracking Christopher Ward watch prices on ebay globally at Watchroll
Tracking Bremont watch prices on ebay globally at Watchtrace
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akirk
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Re: Watchroll update

Post by akirk »

Thanks Scooter
Hi Asqwerth - very much alive!

Paul - agreed, be aware that there are 4 ebay sites that watchcount.com doesn't appear to cover:
Canada - french
Hong Kong
Poland
Motors (probably not an issue!)
Having said that, you would only have missed 2 sales in the last 5 years from those sites :)

Alasdair
Tracking Christopher Ward watch prices on ebay globally at Watchroll
Tracking Bremont watch prices on ebay globally at Watchtrace
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Re: Watchroll update

Post by christam »

Thanks for all the work you put into this. I've just taken my first look and there's a wealth of information there :thumbup:
I am not a collector of watches. I used to be able to say that and know I was telling the truth.
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Re: Watchroll update

Post by yuri9206 »

Perfect Akirk, now is all clear.
Your work is well well done.
Thanks for all made for community, your database is unique!
Best regards :thumbup: :clap:
C8 Pilot MK II; C5 Malvern MK II; C60 Trident Pro 600 black; C11 Titanium Extreme 1000; C65 Trident Classic LE; C60 Trident Titanium Pro 600 #2; C60 Trident Pro 600 white; C11 MSL Black Manta; C11 Titanium Elite 500; C8 Mark I; C11 Makaira pro 500 orange
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Re: Watchroll update

Post by FloridaPhil »

Terrific resource. Thank you for the hard work.
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Re: Watchroll update

Post by MiniMpi »

Great work yet again Alasdair.
It's a brilliant resource that is exceptionally useful.
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