E-commerce giant eBay has put out its official “Top Shopped” report for 2017 which shows Internet of Things and smart home gadgets becoming more popular than ever before, among other consumer tech trends. Nest products ended up being the most popular in the smart home space, with over 211,000 products sold, beating out every other brand and device category in the IoT space.Over 58,000 iRobot Roomba units of some sort were bought and sold on eBay in 2017 as well. The Google Home Mini rounds out the list of the top IoT products on the service in the past 12 months, with the somewhat recent device managing to become popular enough to be bought about 240 times per day, having hence sold approximately 17,000 units despite debuting late in the year, in mid-October.
Smartphones, meanwhile, were sold at a rate of about one every five seconds, and of the 2.6 million sold in the year, Apple’s iPhone X and iPhone 8 reigned supreme with over 60,000 sales overall. eBay’s report did not give any information on what phones won out in the Android space, unfortunately. It is interesting that smartphones were actually eclipsed by watches, with one being sold every four seconds, though that figure also includes traditional timepieces and not just wearables. In any case, these figures should be studied while minding the fact that they only pertain to a single online shopping service, and many of them could represent secondhand sales. Smartphone cases saw a trend of obsession with rainbow motifs and mythical creatures like unicorns over the course of the last year, according to the same report.
Outside of the smart product sphere, Nintendo’s SNES Classic was one of the most coveted products, with over 500,000 units of the retro console being sold on eBay. As emulating old games on a Raspberry Pi or an Android device is a potentially cheaper and more accessible solution, the nostalgia-powered performance of Nintendo’s new retro system is impressive. Outside of the tech sphere altogether, eBay’s top sales for the year acted as a cultural zeitgeist of sorts; with the hype for Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Star Wars merchandise hit over 450,000 sales throughout the year. Special glasses to view the historic eclipse that happened earlier this year also proved to be popular, as did items centered around social change and environmentalism. Refer to the banner below for a more detailed breakdown of eBay’s latest shopping report.
