Did you ever wondered about the price gap between sizes when it comes to purchasing a new pair of shoes? Stockx.com has confirmed what most of us have suspected for a while now: sneaker brands set different prices for every shoe size with interesting variations between smallest sizes and the biggest ones. Nevertheless, sneaker fans that happen to wear a popular shoe size benefit less from this price gap as prove below.

According to the graphic above, the study was based on 517 models between size 8 and size 14, with size 12.5, 13.5 and everything below 8 or above 14 omitted due to low volume sales. We can see that size 8 shoes that are part of this study managed to score a negative 1.9% compared to size 13 shoes that place at 3.5% above the 0 rate.

That means that the size 13 shoes were 3.5% more expensive than the overall average price and that size 8 and size 10 shoes are the least expensive shoe size in this study. Even if the price difference doesn’t seem too much at first, when being applied to the average price of $248 for the 517 pairs of sneakers the study was focused on we get a $13 difference.

For their market pool, Stockx has chosen all the popular brands including athletic, high fashion and casual shoes, meaning that the price difference will affect most online buyers, despite eBay being chosen as the only marketplace for this study.  Here are all the sizes used for this study listed in order of volume:

  • 11              15.0%

  • 10             14.3%

  • 10.5          12.9%

  • 12              11.6%

  • 9.5            10.1%

  • 9                 7.7%

  • 13               7.3%

  • 11.5           6.1%

  • 8.5             5.2%

  • 8                 4.5%

  • 14              2.9%

  • Everything else combined   2.3%

If you wear size 13 and you decide to purchase two pairs of sneakers every month for the next 12 months, by the end of the year you will have lost the equivalent of at least one good pair of shoes because of these unbalanced size prices. Considering the fact that most sneaker fans purchase a great amount of kicks within one year with a constant desire to have the latest releases, we can only imagine what the price difference will do their bank account if they maintain this habit for the next 10 or 20 years.

Can we call this good marketing from the company or are sneaker brands being unfair to us? Also, do you consider shoes, especially limited edition releases, to be a good investment that you can benefit from by reselling them after a while? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comment section.