Hi everyone, I decided to revive the news post section of this website on the main page, since it’ll be easier to post news and information here. Anyway to mark the occasion, here’s the latest updates to the Bakugan Library.
BAKUGAN PRICES
One of the most common questions I’ve seen people ask is, “How much is my Bakugan worth?” I thought a lot about how to solve that issue, and the best way to solve a difficult problem is to first break it up into many mini-problems.
So “How much is my Bakugan worth?”, we need the following
- What Bakugan is this?
- Were there any recent sales of this Bakugan?
- How much was the sale price?
- How long ago was it?
For (1), solving it would require some form of image recognition of Bakugan, and basically need a lot of time / resources to resolve, so I’m just going to leave this problem for a later time, and assume the person already knows what Bakugan they want to check
For (2), after researching a bit, I felt the most reliable place and accessible (read: free) place to obtain data would be to scrape the sold ebay listing for “Bakugan”. So after spending some hours researching this topic, I finally managed to scrape and clean the data from eBay (they only allowed around 3 months of sold data, though I am not sure why there are some records which go back as far as 2022). You can find the list here.
Do take note of the following:
- Prices are in US dollars
- There are 2 prices, first is if it was a “Buy It Now”, second is if it was a “Best Offer Price” which means it is not the actual price, since eBay does not show the price after the best offer
- The listings are still NOT tagged to the actual bakugan record in the Bakugan Library (i am aiming to tag the listings to the record, so I can collate the prices and show history of prices with charts of price change over time)
- The entire process is MANUAL, and it takes quite a bit of time / effort, so I’m planning to do this at most every 2-3 months
I am still thinking how to efficiently tag the ebay listings to the actual bakugan record, since there are already over 11 thousand records, and some of the listings contain multiple Bakugan. The shipping price is also an issue, because some of the sellers purposefully increase the shipping fee and reduce the actual price, so if I were to just take the actual price without shipping the data will be skewed.
Anyway the data is there now (data point till 27 MAY 2024), those who are interested can go take a look. There is a simple search function to search for the ebay title listing. It is an extremely simple search, so the best is just to type 1 or 2 words
I’ll update again once I make further progress on this.
IN OTHER NEWS
I’m exploring to allow users to create “My Bakugan Collection” list on the site. This will allow users to create their own list of Bakugan, just by selecting Bakugan from a list. It is very challenging now due to the way the data is structured on the site, as it doesn’t allow addition of Bakugan that is not in my current list.
Furthermore account creation is currently disabled on the site, as I do not have SSL enabled. And I do not want to spend resources on the SSL certificate since the functions are not even ready.
Eventually if I manage to get this up and working, there is a lot more functionality I would like to implement, but that’s a post for a future time. Basically it’ll take a while to implement this, so…
BAKUGAN LIBRARY INFO
I’ve updated the Bakugan List in the Bakugan Library till Mechtanium Surge. For that season, all I have left are the BakuGold Bakugan, and the BakuBlasters, and I should be more or less finished with Generation 1 (excluding BakuTech).
Currently I have 1975 bakugan recorded, and the big addition is the set of ebay listings which I mentioned earlier.
The following are the Bakugan pending to be recorded:
- BakuTech
- BakuTech Gachi
- Armored Alliance
- Geogan Rising
- Evolutions
- Legends
- Bakugan G3
Hopefully I can find time to do so, as I am still trying to finish unboxing the Bakugan boxes I have. Currently I am at Armored Alliance Wave 3, where I just finished unboxing the Wave 3 Ultra Single Packs, still quite some more to go.
Anyway, if you are still reading till this point, thank you very much. This is probably what I want to share for now.
See you in the next post (hopefully it will be soon)
