Price an item with eBay sold and active listings

An alert tells you something was listed. It doesn’t tell you what it’s worth, or whether anyone actually buys it. That part is on you, and it takes about a minute per listing once you know where to look.

Swipe right on the listing

Two buttons appear: Sold and Active. Each one opens eBay in your browser.

Sold

Active

Fluke 289 True-RMS Industrial Logging Multimeter

$220

Aurora, CO · 9.8 mi · 18 min

Swiping the other way gives you Watch and Delete. The ⋮ in the corner holds everything, including the two the swipes shortcut to, plus Research — the third eBay view, covered further down.

Sold: what people actually paid

Sold opens eBay filtered to completed listings that sold, in used condition.

Read two things off that page.

The prices. These are what buyers paid, not what sellers asked. Look at where most of the sales sit rather than averaging everything — a few will be well off to either side, and they are usually there for a reason. A unit sold for parts, a rarer variant, a bundle with accessories, or a different model with a similar name will all show up in the same search. Check the most recent sales first; a price from eighty days ago may not hold today.

How many sold. This is the count over the window eBay gives you, and it tells you roughly how often the item sells. That matters because it’s how long your money is likely tied up. A low count can mean weak demand, or it can mean weak supply — not many of them come up for sale. The Active page, next, is what tells you which.

Say the Fluke 289 above comes back with fourteen sales, most of them between $190 and $230, and the recent ones near the top of that range. Expect it to sell for $210 to $220, before fees and shipping.

Active: what else is for sale

Active opens the same search, used condition, but for items listed right now.

This is not what the item is worth — a seller can ask anything, and an asking price nobody pays is not evidence of value. What this page gives you is the supply side: how many other people are currently selling the same thing.

Put the two numbers together

Count what sold, count what’s for sale, then read the row that matches.

Sold	Active	What it means
Lots	Few or none	Buy it. Demand is high and supply is low, so it should sell fast.
Lots	Lots	Buy it. It sells, but with that many listed it might take a while.
None	Lots	Skip it. Plenty are for sale and none of them sold — yours would sit there too.
None	None	Check Research before you decide. See below.

The app has this same table built in: open the eBay Research dialog and tap Help.

Research: looking further back than 90 days

An empty Sold page has two very different explanations. The item might not sell on eBay at all — or it might sell fine, just not in the last three months. The Sold page cannot tell those apart, because three months is all it covers.

Tap the ⋮ in the top-right corner of the listing card, then Research.

1. Tap the ⋮ on the card

   Advent Model 300 Bottle Labeler

   $150

   Golden, CO · 16.4 mi · 27 min

2. Tap Research

   Advent Model 300 Bottle Labeler

   $150

   Golden, CO · 16.4 mi · 27 min

   Watch

   Research

   Profit Calculator

   Refine Search

   Mark as Spam

   Delete

3. The dialog opens

   eBay Research

   Brand and model give the closest comps.

   Item name

   Advent Model 300

   Sold

   Recently sold items

   Active

   Currently for sale.

   Research

   eBay's sold data, 3 years back.

   HelpDone

The Research row opens eBay’s own research page with the range already set to the last three years of sold data, so it covers roughly twelve times the history the Sold page does.

Say the alert is an Advent Model 300 bottle labeler at $150. A new one costs a few thousand.

At that price you do not need strong comps. The most you can lose is $150, and one sale is worth many times that. All you need to know is whether anyone buys these at all.

Sold is empty. That is normal for something this uncommon — one rarely comes up for sale. Look at three years instead:

• A few sold in three years — buy it. People pay real money for these, and $150 is what it costs you to find out. The worst case is that it sits in your garage for a few months.
• Very few sold, some listed — look at their prices. If they are priced low and still not selling, don’t buy it. If they are priced very high, or pickup only, or parts only, buyers may want one but not on those terms. If you can make your listing stand out, and are patient, it could be a great buy.
• Nothing sold and nothing listed in three years — walk away. Nobody is buying these and nobody is selling them, so you have nothing to compare yours to.

If the comps look wrong, fix the item name

Marketplace titles are written by sellers, so they are rarely a good search term. The app tidies each one up with AI and saves the result as the item name, and that name is what Sold, Active and Research search for. It is usually close enough.

It only has the seller’s words to work with, though. If the seller wrote Fluke Multimeter and never gave a model, that is what gets searched — and eBay sends back every Fluke multimeter there is, cheap ones and expensive ones mixed together.

Long-press either swipe button, or tap the item name in the Research dialog, and add what is missing:

• Fluke Multimeter → Fluke 289
• Wolf 36" Sealed Burner Rangetop — kitchen remodel → Wolf SRT364G

The model number is often in the seller’s description even when it is missing from the title, so read that first. Failing that, check the photos — a badge on the front, a spec plate, the label on the back panel. If you still can’t find it, message the seller and ask. You can’t get accurate comps without it.

The name you save is reused every time you open that listing again.

Working out what you’d actually make

Say the comps put the Fluke 289 around $210, and the seller is asking $150.

Open ⋮ → Profit Calculator and fill in two boxes:

• Buy Price — 150
• Sells For — 210

It takes off eBay’s fees, 13.6% of the sale price, and shows you two numbers:

• Net Profit — what you keep. Here, about $31.
• ROI — that profit against what you spent. About 21%.

Shipping is not in there. Work out what the postage costs and subtract it yourself. On a small multimeter that barely moves the number; on a rangetop it can take the whole thing.