World Cup Fever on eBay - Vuvuzelas and Can Jersey Sales Predict Who Will Win?

World Cup Fever on eBay - Vuvuzelas and Can Jersey Sales Predict Who Will Win?

It is interesting to find out what impact world events have on the eBay marketplace. We can look at the impact by researching the eBay marketplace and see where there is an increase in searches, sales and price of items related to a world event. Market research gives us the opportunity see the ecommerce sales reach of recent world events on eBay, almost in real time.

Let’s look at the World Cup. Obviously this is a huge event. I know this because most people I know have stopped working to watch or are Tweeting game results and Facebooking "Gooooaaaallll". It is easy for one to stay in touch with the event without actually being there or even watching the game thanks to social media. We can also stay in touch with the World Cup when we research the eBay marketplace and find out the impact here.

I will be using the Terapeak for eBay market research tool to look at trending and sales on eBay for World Cup related items.

Let’s start with the Vuvuzela. What is it? The vuvuzela is a long plastic horn producing the annoying sound heard at soccer matches in South Africa. The noise or sound it makes is similar to a giant swarm of bees. One South African columnist even described it as "the horn from hell."

Where can you get one? Here in the States, it seems to be pretty hard to come by unless you go online, which is great for eBay sellers!

Look at the chart below, we can clearly see the rise in listings and sales for the vuvuzela around the time the World Cup started on June 11th. Although I am looking at this data on July 7th, this information is/would have been available to me to view back in June. An enterprising eBay seller with vuvuzelas to sell could easily have researched this information and potentially jumped on the hot sales trend. I am sure many eBay sellers did exactly this.

As the World Cup starts to come to a close and they enter the finals, vuvuzela sales do seem to be declining. Who is buying all the vuvuzelas anyway?


The majority of vuvuzelas purchased on eBay came from Germany. The German team is still in the World Cup (as of the time when this blog post is written) and their fans are rallying around and making noise with their vuvuzelas.

World Cup Team Jersey Sales. Can they predict who will win?

Looking at the charts below, we can see Spain has more World Cup jersey sales than the Netherlands. Could this be an indicator of who will win?

Team Spain

Team Netherlands

It will be interesting to see if these numbers spike in the next week or so, depending on which team wins.