Exploring WatchCharts Marketplace, a New Watch Sales Platform Backed by Historical Pricing Data

An all too common refrain from watch collectors is that the experience of buying a watch can be something of a headache. While you might be wined and dined if you buy directly from the boutique of a high end luxury brand, the reality is that most of us are hounding forums and enthusiast marketplaces trying to score a deal. But with the open market comes a lot of uncertainty. How do you know if you’re getting a good deal? And how do you know if the person you’re chatting with is going to send you more than an empty box? 

WatchCharts, the watch market research platform whose primary goal is to bring price transparency to watch consumers, recently launched their own buying and selling platform that seeks to alleviate some of the stress. There are a lot of buying and selling platforms for watches, so the addition of one more to the growing matrix of watch shopping options isn’t necessarily newsworthy, but the involvement of WatchCharts adds a new wrinkle to something that is so familiar to watch collectors that it’s part of the very fabric of the hobby.

On the surface, WatchCharts Marketplace looks like any other buy/sell/trade platform. But under the hood, it’s leveraging WatchCharts data that collectors who use the platform will already be familiar with. “We’ve dedicated the better part of five years to collecting, analyzing, and understanding watch market pricing and trends,” said WatchCharts founder Charles Tian. “Many of the problems with the secondary watch market today stem from an imbalance of knowledge that is available to dealers versus collectors. Our goal is to empower collectors by bringing price transparency to every purchase and sale on our platform.”

This is achieved through embedding detailed WatchCharts pricing data directly into each sales post. For example: you search for “Omega Speedmaster” and are met with dozens of listings for various different references of the ubiquitous chronograph. Pricing is displayed upfront, as you’d expect, but listings are also highlighted with notations indicating how fair the price is on the current market. Clicking on a listing for a pre-owned Dark Side of the Moon Apollo 8 with a “good price” label reveals a watch that, according to WatchCharts data, is priced 5% below the current estimated value (which equates to around $400 in this example).

The listing is integrated seamlessly with historical WatchCharts data – you can click on “See Price Guide” to gather further information on that reference’s price history via information that WatchCharts has been tracking for years. What’s more, WatchCharts Marketplace is an aggregator tool, so it’s pulling listings from many other forums and allowing you to see all the data behind those references even when the listing comes from another site. But WatchCharts has benefits that might entice users to list directly with them. 

According to Tian, an overriding goal of the marketplace was to provide real security to users. “We’ve created the most advanced account verification system of any watch marketplace,” Tian told me. For a user to be “verified” on WatchCharts and earn a checkmark that is the visual cue to the community that their account has been fully scrutinized, they first must be paying members on the WatchCharts platform. They then need to pass an identity verification process through Stripe, and enable two-factor authentication on their account. While a casual or occasional watch buyer might not elect to pay what amounts to at least $160 per year for the privilege of being verified, more active sellers might be better able to see the value proposition here.

While a sales platform might not be the first thing you’d expect a data focused tech company like WatchCharts to engage in, if you take a birds eye view of the company’s larger goals it makes quite a bit sense. According to Tian, it’s just another way the company can leverage their massive amount of watch data to inform and educate consumers. “Our core mission is to empower collectors when it comes to researching, buying, and selling watches,” he told me. “This means providing the most accurate market data and best marketplace platform that we can.”

Tian also points out that WatchCharts is not making money through buying or selling watches. Their business model remains focused on the data collected. They make money by selling their data and insights to members of the watch industry who can benefit from that information, so a sales platform that provides accurate and relevant information on current pricing is inherently valuable to the entire community. “This is how we built our reputation with collectors over the past five years,” Tian explains, “and what we need to continue to do in the future to maintain their trust and grow our user base.”

As a consumer, and semi-frequent lister of watches on various forums, this feels like an idea whose time has come. I’m on record as being particularly annoyed by the customary lowball offer that seems to be a part of every watch sale these days, and the general poor behavior of watch collectors on forums is well documented. An environment where your own asking price can be measured against historical data is welcome for those of us who have been trying to sell watches online for fair prices all along. The added layers of security are a potential bonus, although it’s hard to imagine ever completely discounting basic due diligence.

The WatchCharts Marketplace makes its appearance at a time when watch consumers are more price conscious than ever before. The larger watch market has had a wild ride over the past few years, bringing not just new enthusiasts into the fold, but plenty of speculators as well. Engaging enthusiasts in conversations about value is sometimes tricky – there’s an overriding idea that value should be a secondary concern, or not even matter at all when it comes to a watch you love. There’s a perception that discussing pricing trends in the way WatchCharts does is the realm of the investor. 

But from Tian’s perspective, “investing” in watches isn’t even the proper term for the activity we saw create a bubble in the market between 2020 and 2022. “The luxury watch market is basically entirely supply/demand driven with no underlying utility or fundamentals,” he told me. “I would be inclined to characterize this behavior as ‘speculation’ rather than ‘investment.’”

For his part, Tian is motivated by finding the overlooked in his own collecting, not by hype pieces that may or may not increase in value over time. “I’ve always been quite value-driven in my collecting journey, buying almost all of my watches pre-owned and looking for pieces that I felt the market had undervalued,” he said. He went on to say that finding watches that will experience minimal depreciation that he also enjoys intrinsically is itself part of the thrill of collecting. It’s refreshing, I think, to hear someone admit that finding a good deal on a watch that is undervalued is indeed part of the “hunt” that so many collectors enjoy. With WatchCharts data at the ready, their new marketplace platform might be an ideal place to do just that. WatchCharts