It's been a busy time here. I'm either working or trying to sell stuff on eBay. My mouth is still bothering me, so this weekend I decided to just stay in and not put my dentures in all weekend. I think they might be irritating the area that is trying to heal. I have another checkup with the oral surgeon tomorrow and I'm nervous that more surgery is going to be necessary.
I've been taking pictures, but for the most part, only pictures of cards I'm trying to sell on eBay, so I hardly think it counts. This beautiful black marble here I shot the other night after I was done posting auctions. It's a 30 second exposure where I used a penlight to illuminate the scene and remove the shadows… that weird ring-shaped highlight was caused by me moving the penlight in a wide circle. I shot the image with my old Nikon-mount Tamron 90mm f2.5 Macro lens, using the Kawa adapter to mount it on my XTi. The adapter pretty much permanently lives on this lens and I really love the images it produces. Isn't that nice? I'm definitely going to procure another adapter for the Nikkor 28mm and give that lens a real workout too.
So most of my “free time” has been spent getting auctions up on eBay to finance my wedding kit as discussed awhile back. Right now I'm about a third of the way to Stage One. By rights I should be well into Stage Two by now, but I am finding myself thwarted by what I can only describe as “abject greed” on the part of people looking for deals. In fact that has been a recurring theme I keep running into lately, one of the earliest examples back when I was trying to sell my Nikon gear to finance my EF 70-300mm f4-5.6 IS lens. The kit would have fetched about $500 to $600 on eBay, and I was quoted somewhere in that neighborhood by a retailer who after having my gear shipped to their location, and holding on to it for weeks and weeks (and being quite rude to me on the phone) finally quoted me a price of $175 for the entire kit. They gave a number of excuses, one of which was that my Tamron 90mm was extremely foggy and needed to be sent out for cleaning. Just look at the fog in that picture above and you won't see what they're talking about either. (The Tamron was stored in a sealed case with a dessicant for years–to say fog is “unlikely” would be an understatement.) Greedy bastards.
Hey listen, I know people are looking for deals, or looking out for their interests, whether they're offering you 30% of what your gear is worth like they're doing you a favor, or needling you over a few pennies worth of rocks, or, as has been happening lately, making ridiculously low offers on your collectibles. But still, there's deals, and then there's insults. I wouldn't blame anyone for coming in with offers at about 10% under value, but 50%? 70%?? 90%????? I've had people e-mail me, offer me a teensy fraction of what my stuff is worth, and then insist I end my auction early so I can sell it to them. I typically ask if they're on crack. It's been a real eye-opening experience. Eye-opening, eye-rolling, head-shaking… and generally disgusting.
When I listed my most valuable set of trading cards for sale, I was offering them at over 20% off retail. Partly because the cards weren't in mint condition, partly because I was selling on eBay, and partly because I didn't want to have to wheel and deal. I figured people would see the price, recognize what a great offer it was, and jump at it. Instead all they did was try to see how much lower they could make me go. The obnoxious thing about this is the set in question contains nine special cards (called the power nine) which alone account for 75% of the value of the set. It takes all of two minutes looking at completed auctions on eBay to see that I could sell those cards individually and make most of what I was asking for, and yet people had the gall to offer me FAR less for the entire set than I could assuredly make selling just those 9 cards. Jesus! I actually had to write up a price breakdown based on current eBay prices and post it on the auction just to get people to stop making ridiculous offers to me. In the end the set didn't sell at all, nobody was willing to pony up the cash (it's eBay, and if they can't take advantage of me, somebody desperate enough to agree to such a deal will show up sooner or later.)
Now I have a set up for auction that isn't worth nearly as much, but is ironically much rarer. It is arguably a one-of-a-kind item, in that I have never seen a complete set for sale anywhere, and neither has anyone else to my knowledge. But that doesn't stop the bottom feeders from slithering out of the dark to try and get it for a tenth of its value. I had one guy try and argue with me that I was overvaluing the set because he had found a retailer than valued some of the cards in the set less than I do–conveniently ignoring that the same retailer valued most of the cards in the set more than I do. So if you were to actually buy the set at the retailer's prices (which you can't because the retailer doesn't have the whole set since it is so damned rare) you would end up paying almost 50% more than my asking price!!! Holy crap! Yet another auction where I had to post a followup explanation for people who should be able to do the math themselves.
But I'm not losing hope. I know eventually I will be able to move the sets and get a fair price for them, it's just been irritating–I suppose I shouldn't let it bother me, but it does.
The thing about collector's items is that they're only worth what people are willing to pay. To me, who doesn't play the game and has no interest in it, they're completely worthless, just as some of the things I collect are likely worthless to you. So you have a very specialized audience for your cards, which means you need time.
I understand you're insulted because you have put some work into making your collection, but remember you put that work in as a hobby that you enjoyed (I'm assuming). I don't think that just because I've put time and money into the gardens on my property that I'm going to get a return when we sell the house. I've enjoyed the gardening — it's my hobby. It's costly and it should improve the value of the house, but it's not worth what I've put in. And when somebody says an offer is insulting, I think more of a craftsman who's created something exceptional and necessary, something with intrinsic value, and people are offering him prices that will starve his kids.
I don't think people are trying to insult you. They might just be testing how firm your prices are. They might be trying to bully you — I don't know. But there are all kinds of people on ebay, and you've described your strategies for buying things to me before (such as looking for auctions where the seller has misspelled a word), and perhaps you feel you're ethical in other ways, perhaps you offer a fair price, but you are definitely taking advantage of the seller's ignorance. (In a way, bullying.)
All these people are doing is wasting your time, really. I don't think you're required to answer their emails. If somebody sends you something that you consider really unrealistic, don't write back. You don't owe them an explanation at all! Let them go through the proper channels and bid, or keep their dumb offers to themselves.
I don't know what retail is, when you refer to retail — I'm imagining, but could be wrong, that you mean something like a card store, comic store, book store, or magazine store that sells used cards and sets like you describe. But the advantage that retail has is they can sit in the case for a long time and they're not really costing the store anything, assuming that they make most of their money on having a lot of different sets to sell and other business, like the aforementioned comic books, books, collectibles, etc.
(The comic book store up the street from us, the one owned by C.A. whom we went to college with, is gone. I don't know if they went out of business, but maybe it's a hard time to sell that kind of stuff.)
Anyway, because of that property of physical stores (permanence, time), I recommended setting up your own e-store and maybe listing everything you have to sell in one auction, but actually only auctioning off one thing in that auction — I haven't looked at ebay enough to see how people do it — but you need to have time on your side so you can wait for the one person who really, really wants that set at a price you're willing to sell it for. I'd look around at what other people do and try to make some of those strategies work for you. Good luck with selling your collection.
I understand what you are saying vis-a-vis retail, which is one of the reasons why I am selling significantly under retail prices. I guess what I am not communicating well, is that my pricing scheme is based on going eBay rates for whatever I'm trying to sell.
I suspect my particular choice of collectibles seems pretty esoteric to you, but there are currently 27,125 eBay auctions running for MtG cards… within that tiny category there's an enormous amount of business going on. That said, within that slice of the eBay pie, there are some things that are considered “guaranteed sells”, and the most guaranteed of all sells are the “power nine”, the nine hottest cards in all of MtG. The only way to *not* sell a power nine card is to price it way above its going rate–even power 9 cards in “nigh-shredded” condition fetch high prices. Eight of the “power nine” each go (consistently) on eBay for about X, and that's taking condition into account. The ninth card goes for 2X. So to the average ebay buyer or seller who deals in these types of collectibles, the going rate for these 9 cards tends to run about 10X. There is no argument on this point from any potential buyer I've talked to. They all concede that is the appropriate price for the power-9. Now I'm selling a set of 300 cards which has the Power-9 in it, plus dozens upon dozens of cards that all totalled go for about 3X at going eBay rates. And I'm getting offers of 5X to 6X and being told it's a fair offer.
It's not sentimentality that irks me about these offers. It the absolute certainty that someone who bought the set I'm selling could break it up and sell the pieces individually and make more than twice what they are offering me. The element of sentimentality here is my desire to sell the set as a whole. You're right I put a lot of time and effort into it, and that's why I'd like to see it go to another collector who would cherish it like I have. But it's looking like most of the people who would like to buy something like this simply want to chop it up and sell the pieces, and as a result they are looking to maximize their profits by shortchanging me.
Anyway I appreciate that you are trying to help. Your advice is right on, I need to be patient, and I shouldn't let low-ball offers bother me… shouldn't even respond.
Yeah, that seems to be the problem then (being bothered). If your price is working for other people, then it should work for you and you should ignore the people who are trying to intimidate you into giving them a lower price. That may be a very good strategy for them — it might work one time out of ten. I definitely wouldn't write back — send it right to the trash before it can even get you steamed up.
By the way, I wasn't trying to insult your choice of collectible — I was merely making the point that they have very little intrinsic value. It's a piece of printed cardstock. And so the value is 99% what people are willing to pay, not what they paid yesterday.
I remember a retail store selling beanie babies once, in a paper bag so you didn't know which one you'd get, for $15 and they sold out in less than an hour. Now they're pretty much worthless, I see them in clearance bins when I see them at all. I can say, “this sold for $15,” but five minutes after everybody has decided they're worthless, they're not worth $5. That was my only point, and I was basing it on the fact that you haven't sold the cards at the price you calculated was reasonable. I wasn't trying to imply that you won't sell at that price — just hypothesizing that the ebay format is maybe not the best for selling that particular item, and offering strategies to compensate.
Right. I understand. Thanks for the advice and you are totally correct. $700 for a piece of cardboard? Now all we need is some sailor to eat one and it will be the great tulip crash all over again…
I always felt that when I went to the casino to play poker I met some “interesting” people. There were always a few pleasant people, but there are always a number of people who you wonder why they ever left the house. (Some were dressed like they hadn't planned to leave the house, despite having hundreds of dollars to buy poker chips with.)
I'm getting the idea that half the population of eBay are the less-well-adjusted relatives of the least desirable people you meet at the casino.
As they sometimes say as the poker table “this ain't church.” Which I guess is true, since nobody tried to molest me. ZING!
I think you are dead on in your assessment. They are trying to squeeze you to maximize their own profits. If they can convince you that 50% of the going eBay rate is a fair price, they can make lots more money themselves. That, to me, is unscrupulous and greedy. Now, if they told you they were not collectors and were interested in reselling, and wanted to give you 80% of the going rate so they could still turn a profit, that would be different. They are being honest and assuming some of risk in exchange for giving you expedience.
You can get a deal on ebay because there are sellers who don't care about the price they get or who are desperate to get rid of their stuff. So there are probably people who are willing to email every single auction to find the one with the desperate seller. I guess I don't see why it hurts to ask. They're asking, you're saying no (or ignoring them), the end. Maybe you don't like them subverting ebay? Again, the solution is to ignore. I've written to people before who were selling things (some masks I bought) and received replies in which they offered me different items, or offered to sell me something similar off ebay. So it really isn't unheard of for sellers to sell around the ebay structure, and not unreasonable (IMO) for buyers to ask.
Your troubles have also made me consider that when you calculate the “going rate,” it seems you must take into account the number of times an item has been listed. I don't know how tricky that would be to figure out. If the same item has to be listed four times to sell at the “going rate,” then you have to subtract all of that listing cost off the going rate compared to an item that's snapped up as soon as it's listed.
I hope your dental appointment went well.
Just a couple of observations.
Maybe the power 9 cards alone are valuable because people are looking specifically for a power 9 card, but they don't want to pay for all the other cards. I looked at some auctions for power 9 cards, and they're very expensive. If your kind of set doesn't sell regularly, then I think you're looking for an even more specific buyer. You might be better off breaking it up and selling the pieces separately.
I also noticed that there are a lot of card stores selling these cards, which might put you at a disadvantage, simply because people are more trusting of a brick-and-mortar store than some guy, even if the guy has a high rating (which I assume you do) and a lot of ebay transactions (which I also assume you do).
But I think it's more likely that your difficulty is because you're selling a lot of expensive things and people might be looking for individual cards and don't have a lot of money to spend on a collection which might include cards they don't need.
I wasn't happy last year to buy some “Secret Central” dolls for K because they were being sold in lots of three, and I only needed certain individual dolls. If they had been in individual auctions, even if they had cost a little more individually, then I would've bought the individual dolls. I figure selling three at a time is completely a convenience for the person listing the auction, because she cuts down on her listing fees and she must know that only certain people are going to want all three dolls. So I can, again, see where a buyer might offer you a low price because listing so many cards together is a convenience for you.