Fountain Pen Market Share

[terminal]

I tried to do something similar to this a half a year ago... well, it was similar in the sense that I tried to determine market shares essentially the same way. I got landed on hard by the FPN "community" for my efforts. Good times.

 

But anyway, one problem that I ran in to was the eBay part. I'm curious about the specifics of how you gathered the data. I felt, after looking, that taking a snapshot of the current auctions on eBay wasn't really enough... that I would need some kind of historical data. I tried looking at completed auctions and found that, because of the volume of business eBay does that they only keep old auctions around for two or three months. I also found the searches on eBay hard to narrow because of constant cross-listings and mis-listed items. It's just so contaminated. Like, if you're searching for "parker fountain pen" say, even if you are narrowing it by "new" and/or category, you're still going to get used pens and parker is going to seem much larger than TWSBI, which hardly ever turn up on eBay. But that may not mean much. I ended up turning to some of those eBay ripping sites where they try to save a really long history of auctions and then estimate a value. The problem with those sites was that they keep their data fairly close to their vests.

 

The other hting I ran in to, which you mention, is the problem of search terms. The fact is, searching for each pen with the same text doesn't work well. THat's because people search pens differently. I tried to use the Google tools to get the best representation I could. I don't think standardizing the search terms works. Here's an example: some pen names are taken from names of cities, so people are more apt to type the string you have there (with "fountain pen" after it). In some cases, however, the pen name may speak for itself.... and of course this applies also to the google searches of FPN. And there you have the additional problem of relying on what El Goog has chosen to cherry pick too.

 

ANyways, this is fascinating stuff and I certainly think it's interesting. I'll think more about it too. I think there's a lot of good information here.

[een brouwer]

This is an interesting little study. Thanks for posting it. I chose montblanc but its likely that those posts are more memorable to me so it seems like there are more of them.

[stefanv]

The other thing I ran in to, which you mention, is the problem of search terms. The fact is, searching for each pen with the same text doesn't work well.

 

Agreed. For instance, one could assume that the ONLINE brand of fountain pens is probably the most popular, with 4,560,000 hits in Google when I search for "ONLINE fountain pen". That's twice as many hits as Cross got!

 

:)

Edited November 11, 2012 by stefanv