Are you hesitating to buy an insect because you don’t know if it’s at market price? You don’t know what the maximum bid should be on eBay because you’re not familiar with market prices?
InsectNet is here for you with this new tool: the Insect Price Checker.
We recorded over 10,000 insect sales on eBay since 2021. Search for your species and it will give you an idea of past prices on eBay.
I like this concept! It does seem to diminish its usefulness by having no reference photo to determine the relative condition of specimens. It also seems to significantly underrepresent the number of sales based on a couple of groups I looked at. Nonetheless, it is a great idea.
Today we have 12,000 transactions registered. It is already interesting for some genera (Parnassius, Ornithoptera for example) and still not enough for some others. I will add some transactions every month so the tool will be more and more useful.
For pictures, links towards the eBay listing work for less than 3-month old sales. So you can see pictures of recent sales. Unfortunately keeping an historic of all pictures is impossible (would be too costful). I agree it would be great.
Which groups are you looking at ? Note that we keep only specimens above $30. So for common species, you won't see any listing.
I was looking at Agrias, and some more expensive Saturniidae (Copiopteryx, Eudaemonia/Eustera, Loxolomia, Etc.). I typically search the ebay sold or completed listing looking for price checks but like you mentioned, it only goes back a few months.
