Recently we wrote about the increase in searches for air conditioners during the heat wave affecting many parts of the country, causing the share of search clicks on the term ‘air conditioners’ to increase 268% for the week ending July 10, 2010. Upon publishing these trends, eBay confirmed that they were also seeing increases in both search and purchasing activity for air conditioners. We received one comment regarding the initial post around the fact that many of the searches are only for research and much of the search activity taking place online is to inform an offline purchase. While purchasing air conditioners online may seem non-intuitive and prohibitive due to size and shipping costs, eBay provided evidence to the contrary to show that ACs are being purchased online.

Similarly, 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’. During the peak week for searches, the number of air conditioners sold also increased 38.6%* and while demand was high, the average selling price was highly unchanged during the peak week with an increase of only 1.9%*. Another 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.
*Based upon internal eBay data