Question about Playboy Magazine

I have a bunch of old Playboy's from 60's to the 90's. I was looking on Ebay and I see that there is such a huge difference in price for the same issues. For example - The August 1993 issue with Pam Anderson and Dan Aykroyd sold for $3000 on 3/20/20 with the description being "good" then the same exact one sold today 3/26/20, for $500 and the condition is like new? Also, when trying to do any research to find out why certain issues that are identical (not graded, no auto, no special edition) sell for such different prices
I keep seeing the same sentence next to the issue "Playboy editions with multiple covers" what does that mean?

Hi jlmcards, thanks for stopping by. The prices can fluctuate quite a bit for signatures, for one thing. So if one of those had authenticated signatures of either Pam Anderson or Dan Aykroyd, or both, that would make a big difference.

Grade affects price tremendously too. If these are professionally graded (only CGC at the moment for magazines), you'll see huge leaps at the high end. Often magazine sellers on eBay are not very skilled at grading, and will just put stuff like "good" or "excellent" for items that may range from 2.0 to 9.4. So perhaps the "good" copy was actually really high grade from the scans?

Check out the recent Heritage magazines auction for some great sales examples of a wide range of professionally graded Playboy. These will be in the Nosto database and contribute to the pricing update scheduled for next week as well.

On the "multiple covers" thing - that just means there are cover variants - Cover A, Cover B, and so on. This is very common with comic books, to the point of being annoying and nearly redundant (simply changing colors a big and calling that a scarcer variant, ugh).