Roots Archives Forum

Thanks litelet and thank you Ron for bringing attention to my post. I hope to make continuous small improvements over the next few weeks.

To note: the results before September 18 may be a little bit spotty (some non-reggae and missing many results). However I believe I have this issue (mostly) fixed now. If anyone sees any non-reggae/ska results showing up, or seeing auctions that the tracker is missing I'd really like to know.

Praises,
Jah Chicken

Not much else to say expect for a HUGE thank you for this very useful tool!

In my favorites too...

JC: to make it better you must include records sold via Ebay UK. Is this the case? Great start! Cheers!

Some ideas: (1) a "price' tab allowing to display from most to least expensive records (or vice versa), (2) a way to display just one title as so to compare prices for a similar item, (3) a tab to display titles that had the highest bidders, (4) a tab to display the records that were most over evaluated vs. their average price, (5) a tab to display the records that were most under evaluated vs. their average price, (6) an index showing average selling price per format against time (last 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, 3 year, 5 year) (7) a comments section for us to explain why this is such a great record / deal / or not.

This way we can really track reggae vinyl value and make it better than pop sike.

Also, why not call this site: Reggae Street (vs. Wall Street), or Reggae Roots Market

Cheers!

Thanks gunosantos for checking it out! Thank you Vlad also for the feedback!

In response to the feedback:
The site should be tracking all reggae record sales on EBay from any country of origin. I can see how this is not apparent because I list all the auction results in USD currency. I think it would definitely be useful to include the country of origin and the currency native to that of the sellers country as additional fields. There are a lot of real tricky things I could do with currency calculations (e.g. if it sold for $50 a year ago, then it really means $53 today). I think some of those things are far off for me at this point.

I agree that the result sorting you mentioned (by price, bid count, etc.) should be a priority.

I will attempt to address the displaying of prices and average prices of similar items once I get the tagging functionality in place. The issue that I'm facing currently is that there is no real computational way to know if 2 items are actually the same thing. There are ways that I can make a really good guess, but nothing is a sure bet (being that all sellers have their own format for entering their auction data). If all the results are properly categorized then their is a lot of exciting stuff we can do with similarity (price trending being high on that list).

Thanks for the feedback and support!

Roots,
Jah Chicken

Congrats on the proyect...Keep it up..

Nice work! Good concept.

Dont know if its still usefull for you but here is a non reggae entry:

http://www.rootsvinylguide.com/414
& raspect!

this person is overpriced.i sent an email to your website,to help them out.

http://trustyd.gemm.com/

Greetings,

@Nefta and Algorithm: Thanks for the support!

@Litelet: This is much appreciated so thank you. This was one of the early entries where my client was a little to greedy about injecting content. This entry has been removed and the problem was already fixed.

@h1n1: Haha very nice! I hope that the site will help make some sellers prices more fair over time.

@Vlad: I forgot that EBay filters the visibility of certain items based on the requesting customers country. I think that they made this change a couple years ago, leading to much controversy. After doing a little digging, I can indeed see that there is a significantly larger churn of reggae record auctions on the EBay UK site. My site is currently only indexing items visible from the Ebay US portal so my apologies for the misinformation in an earlier post! There is a little fine tuning I want to do with my automated EBay client and then I intend to open the flood gates to the EBay UK site. I have the option of requesting this data from any EBay portal and intend to start including them all (non-English speaking countries included).

UPDATES: In recent updates I've included record item specifics (size, speed, duration, sub-genre, condition), country or origin, and all available pictures for the item. I have retroactively fetched all the additional data fields for all the previously tracked auction items on the site. Some of the item specifics are spotty and variant, and I'm considering allowing those fields to be editable (as part of a larger tagging initiative). I also plan to implement some better sorting capabilities on the search and index pieces of the site.

I much appreciate suggestions for more features and the injection of more data fields that compose an EBay auction that may be interesting for historical purposes. Thanks!

Roots,
Jah Chicken