eBay expert reveals the hottest toy of this Holiday season

Updated

The cold weather’s officially hit the East Coast and the rest of the country which means the inevitable is upon us — winter is coming.

Before we know it, the holiday season will be here and the frenzy to get the best and hottest items on everyone’s wishlists will become a priority.

Luckily, eBay’s staying ahead of the game so we don’t have to guess what exactly those items will be, as the e-commerce giant has rounded up a list of predictions for this year’s hottest toys of the holiday season.

Michel Mosser, eBay’s GM of Lifestyle & Toys shared that “there’s a lot of firsts with toys for eBay this holiday season,” including the launch of Toytopia, which provides a one-stop landing for every toy imaginable (dolls, action figures, STEM toys and more.)

Mosser continued:
“What you’ll find with eBay’s Holiday proposition is that it’s really this mix of what we’re calling ‘then, now and wow.’ When you think about eBay and the breadth of assortment that we have on the site — we have this amazing collection of vintage items, we have these incredible, impossible-to-find special things — we also have this great breadth of selection of new inventory that we get from our partners on the platform like Hasboro and others. So we have this sort of unparalleled selection across these different categories.”

Here are eBay’s prediction for the top 50 toys this Holiday season:

eBay is no longer just a spot for vintage rarities and can’t-find-anywhere collectors’ items, though the site’s toy selection still has a strong market for those (think first-edition Transformer toys and one-of-a-kind Magic: The Gathering cards, for example.)

Rather, the site has become a first-choice destination for brand new items at fixed and lower prices (a sky-high 81 percent of all merchandise sold on the site is now new), something the company has been able to shift to seamlessly as the retail apocalypse has made e-commerce the primary form of shopping for new items.

But as Mosser explained, what sets eBay apart from other retailers is its ability to sell toys across any given category at every stage of development and release, from decades ago to the most recent iteration.

If we use the Transformers example from before, Mosser explains, eBay would be able to provide both a never-opened first-edition Transformers toy and the newest action figure being released in time with the series’ ‘Bumblebee’ movie this winter.

In short, not many other retailers (if any) can provide that range of variety, something Mosser describes as “targeting kids of all ages.”

Mosser also revealed what toys we can be expecting to see hit it big on the site this holiday, per consumer behavior observed through the latter half of this year:

“We’ve been watching some things over the summer and looked at some data between March and September and saw L.O.L. Surprise, for example, was super hot last year and is continuing to be on trend (we sold 149,000 L.O.L. Surprise toys between march and September this year.) We have this great velocity and really interesting industry data which you’ll see eBay sharing a lot as we go into holiday.”

And if you're worried that you're already behind on holiday shopping and planning, you're not alone, as Mosser shared that holiday shopping on the site "picks up as we get into late October, early November and then hits peak through cyber week and mobile Wednesday."

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