You want to sell a bike. You type the model, you see twelve listings between 1,800 and 2,400 francs, and you think "2,000, that's the market." Three weeks later, nobody has written.
The problem isn't your arithmetic. It's what you counted.
Two numbers people mistake for each other
The asking price is what a seller displays. An intention, a hope, sometimes a mistake.
The selling price is what somebody actually paid. A fact.
Between the two lies everything that didn't sell — and that's exactly what you're looking at. A listing that has been online for two months is, by definition, one whose price didn't convince anyone. The longer it stays, the more visible it gets. The median of what you observe is therefore pulled upward by the listings that failed.
Listelo prices your item against real listings, and tells you where the number comes from. Try Listelo
Survivorship bias, in reverse
In statistics, survivorship bias means looking only at what succeeded. On second-hand platforms it's the opposite: you only see what hasn't succeeded yet.
What sold has disappeared. Tutti and Anibis delete the sold listing, with no archive. Ricardo keeps a record of completed auctions, but not in an easily searchable form. On eBay, access to real transactions is reserved for a handful of partners — not for new sign-ups.
Put differently: the data everyone wants is the data nobody shows.
What you can still do with it
Not having selling prices doesn't mean working blind. Three ways to get close:
Look at the spread, not the median. If asking prices for the same model run from 1,200 to 4,000 francs, the median means nothing — you're probably looking at several different things (a bare frame and a complete bike, say). A readable market is a tight market. When the gap between the first and third quartile exceeds a factor of three or four, the number in the middle is noise.
Count the disappearances. A listing you follow that vanishes in ten days tells you something about its price. One that stays two months does too. It's slow, but it's the only free and honest measurement within your reach.
Sit slightly below the median of asking prices. Since what you see is pulled upward, aiming a little lower isn't underselling: it's correcting a known bias. Your item's condition then shifts that reference — upward if it's as new, sharply downward if a part is missing.
What you should never accept
A tool that hands you a "selling price" without saying where it comes from. The question is simple: are these online listings or completed transactions?
If the answer is vague, it's asking prices dressed up as sales. And a wrong number delivered confidently costs more than no number at all: it makes you hold a price for three weeks instead of adjusting in the first.
In one sentence
Other people's displayed prices are a hypothesis, not a result. Treat them that way, and keep the correction margin for yourself.