An interesting post over on Hitwise Intelligence by Heather Dougherty earlier this month profiles how this Summer’s heat wave in the US has driven online sales of air conditioners. What I found most interesting was the eBay-focused data…

eBay experienced increases in the Air Conditioner category during the same week ending July 10, 2010 with a 46% increase in the volume of searches for ‘air conditioner’, ‘window air conditioner’ and ‘portable air conditioner’.

Going one step-further, we thought it would be compelling to see if similar trends were occurring on our other sites such as eBay Classifieds and Shopping.com. Sure enough, the trends are fairly consistent across the board. Digging even deeper, you can see that searches for air conditioners on eBay Classifieds peaked a week earlier than they did on eBay or Shopping. One could obviously attribute this to people wanting to shop locally before going onto eBay or other sites.

Searches for Air Conditioners – eBay Classifieds

Searches for Air Conditioners – Shopping.com

Searches for Air Conditioners – eBay.com

Not only that, the higher levels of search activity seem to follow higher levels of listings. Leading one to conclude that once again, online sellers are playing Nostradamus to consumer demand…

“[An] interesting trend is the ability of the eBay sellers to predict demand in terms of their inventory – in this case, the number of listings was the highest the week ending July 3, 2010, right before the peak, with a small decrease in the subsequent weeks of 2.3%* and 3.6%*. Watching the listings of eBay sellers could offer some predictive insight into the popularity of certain categories and products– like last year’s holiday hit, Zhu Zhu Pets.”

Cheers,
RBH