Antique Paperweights
Handmade, glass paperweights come in thousands of colors, sizes and shapes. Some can be identified from a hot stamped mark, others have a name or mark engraved, and most have no marks ar all. Different makers have a following on Ebay and the prices paid reflect that.
Ebay has created a series of categories which attempt to organize paperweight auctions. Unfortunately, they have no control over how paperweight sellers actually use their categories. In fairness to sellers, the categories leave lots of room for interpretation. Should a dog shaped paperweight signed by the artist be listed as an animal paperweight or a studio paperweight? I realize there is an option to list an item in more than one category, but since there is a charge for that, I doubt most sellers bother. A buyer with a narrow range of interests has choices; browse through everything, only look in select categories, or learn to use the advanced search functions.
Browsing through everything is really not an option when there are 3,000+ auctions at any one time and they turn over weekly. For most using this approach I suspect it means they look at as much as they can, as they can and that has to be good enough. I'm sure that is also why seller's forums have frequent threads where sellers try to understand why two near identical items, listed at the same time, brought such different prices. The existing search process has a large random factor.
Looking in selected categories slims down the number of items to look at, but it's obvious the best deals are the missidentified and misscategorized items, and this approach won't find them.
Advanced search will turn up missspellings and allows the knowledgeable collector to target only those items in whcih they are interested. As with the category search this approach misses listings from clueless sellers who don't include the title terms which the specialist collector uses for search. If you really want to find "Sleepers" it always takes work. I would guess few people take advanced search to its's limits. Most probably find a few search terms, common misspellings, and specialized words that let them find bargins every so often and are content with that.
Our goal with these sites is to use advanced search to filter the irrelevant items. That way a collecter can maximize their productivity by starting on our pages with a filtered result set and looking for bargins in that.
As a starting point, Paperweight Categories with a hundred or more items include:
We are working on turning these into filtered results pages where visitors can start their quest for efficient bargin hunting.
We are providing these same advanced search pages at other glass sites EAPG as well.