Sold prices are back — faster, more accurate, and in 8 countries
If you have used Profit Prophet over the past few weeks, you will have noticed the Sold figure on scan cards was usually empty. Scans were slower too. Both had the same cause, and both are now fixed.
What broke
In late July, eBay changed their site so that sold and completed listings can only be viewed while signed in. That single change cut off the data source that Profit Prophet — and most other pricing tools — relied on for sold comparables.
It was worse than just missing data. Every scan was still waiting on that dead lookup before giving up, so scans became slow as well as incomplete. You were paying thirty seconds for a number that could never arrive.
What we did about it
We rebuilt the sold-data pipeline from scratch. Sold comps now come from a dedicated collector that reads real sold listings and publishes them straight to the app. The old lookup is gone entirely, which is why scans are noticeably quicker than they were even before the problem started.
4–8 seconds
to price an item nobody has scanned before — then instant, for everyone
Better comparables, not just more of them
The interesting part was not fetching the data. It was working out which sold listings actually count.
Search eBay for a Dyson vacuum and you get filters, batteries and brush heads alongside the machines. Search for a barbecue and you get the grill grates. Early on we filtered these with keyword rules, and they failed in ways that were genuinely hard to spot.
A Weber Spirit II gas barbecue was valuing at £29.99. The filter had kept “Grill Grates for Weber Spirit II” — because the title contains the word grill — and thrown away the actual barbecues, because British sellers list them as BBQ. The same item now prices at £205, which is what they really sell for.
No keyword list survives that. So comparables are now matched by AI, which reads the item you scanned and the listings we found and decides which are genuinely the same product. It works in both directions: scan a vacuum and you get vacuums; scan that vacuum’s replacement battery and you get batteries, not the machine.
Used and new, priced separately
Sold prices are now split by condition, so you can price against what you are actually holding rather than a blended average of boxed and loose. A sealed copy and a disc-only copy are different products in everything but name, and the difference is often several times the price.
Now working in 8 countries
Sold data previously existed only for the UK. It now covers:
- United Kingdom
- United States
- Australia
- Germany
- Canada
- France
- Italy
- Poland
Each with local sold prices in local currency. Along the way we found that scans from several countries had been quietly falling back to UK pricing — so an Irish or Dutch seller was being shown British numbers for a market they were not selling in. That is fixed too.
What to expect
The first time anyone scans a particular item, it takes a few seconds longer while we fetch its sold history. After that it is instant, for every user, forever. Bundle scans fetch sold data for the first twelve items during the scan; the rest fill in behind and appear next time.
Sold prices are live now — no update needed, it works on the version you already have.
Get Profit ProphetWhy this took a while
We could have shipped a partial fix within days. The reason we did not is that the sold price is the number people buy against. A wrong price presented confidently is worse than no price at all — the Weber barbecue would have had someone walk past a £200 item believing it was worth thirty quid.
So it was worth getting right rather than getting out. Thanks for your patience while we did.