Is eBay really cheaper?

I was surprised to find that while looking at the product pricing data we are monitoring for MAP violations an odd occurrence.

I kept seeing products priced higher on eBay than on the Retailer’s site. At first I thought there was probably a shipping component that I was missing, but that wasn’t the case. Both product pages offer free shipping. So the only difference is that if you bought that product off of eBay instead of Wayfair then 6 out of the 7 days you were paying a premium.

While this is definitely not anything conclusive it’s interesting enough to compel me to pull back the onion layers even more. So more to follow soon on that…

As a side note I am happy to report that in our price monitoring all of these products I looked at were in compliance with the Brand’s minimum advertised price agreements! We’ve helped reduce these MAP violations from over 1k a day down to less than around 75 daily.