62-Piece Magformers Rainbow Set

  • Unleash the magic of magnets with this 62-piece building set
  • OK “unleash” might be dramatic, but you and your kids will enjoy them
  • These are legit Magformers at a legit low price
  • Made with “Neodymium Rare-Earth Magnets" which sounds like something a super-villain might seek
  • Model: 63076 (Let’s again call out Professional Disc Golf Association member #63076, James Schubert, who since we last sold these Magformers went on to participate in the Ice Bucket tournament in Lakewood, New Jersey and placed 13th among intermediate players. Way to go, Schoob. Don’t let winter’s icy hand freeze your dreams of disc golf mastery.)
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Standard Deviants

It’s impossible to find genuine Magformers on sale, so when we sell 'em, we sell a lot of 'em. This price is $5 lower than the last time, so we expect to see that trend continue even though it’s not the holiday season. We’ll see.

Looking back at the previous sales, we noticed something strange. And so did Meh-er @ruouttaurmind

I’m a bit surprised at the low volume of comments compared to the rather high volume of sales.

It’s true. That day we sold 850 Magformers with only 50 comments in the thread. Usually when something is selling like hotcakes, the forum lights up like hot … forums. A 850:50 ratio of units sold to comments seems low to us (and @ruouttaurmind).

But is it really? Our curiosity piqued, we decided to do some analysis of past sales to see if this ratio really stood out. We took the last 36 sales with only 1 price (for simplicity of calculation) and compared units sold, revenue, and comments.

The average Units:Comments ratio for these sales was 9.54, or 9.54 units sold for every comment. This ratio was 14.71 for the Magformers. So yes, there was generally less discussion on them given the volume of sales. But that’s not a complete story because this ratio of Units:Comments will depend on the price of the thing we’re selling. If it’s cheap, we’ll sell a lot of units.

To account for this we also checked the Revenue:Comments ratio. That is, how much money did we take in per comment. The average of this ratio for the last 36 sales was $249.01, compared to $625.28 for the Magformers, an even starker discrepancy.

But these are averages, and as the statistically-minded of you (presumably the only ones who have bothered to read this far) know, the spread of the data (standard deviation and its kin) matters as much as the average. To illustrate:

Here’s a scatter of the last 36 sales as well as the 2 Magformers sales, with Units:Comments on the vertical axis and Revenue:Comments on the horizontal. You can see that the Magformers (in yellow) are certainly above average in terms of Units:Comments, but not the highest overall. They’re greater outliers in terms of Revenue:Comments, but not that highest. That distinction belongs to a Shark vacuum we sold on February 2nd.

So @ruouttaurmind was right — the volume of comments compared to the volume of sales for the Magformers was unusual. But we might not call it aberrant.

What was the point of all this? Nothing, really. Like everything else in life, this exercise was deeply, deeply meaningless.

So far today...

  • 73648 of you visited.
  • 37% on a phone, 5% on a tablet.
  • 5299 clicked meh
  • on this deal.

And you bought...

  • 693 of these.
  • Sold out at 11:57pm ET
  • That’s $25975 total.
  • (including shipping)

Who's buying this crap?

How many are you buying?