[IC] Mulri-Vendor Marketplace

Without wanting to sound negative on this I am not sure what is in it for the buyers? Most sellers tend to oversell their vintage equipment (we have all seen phrases like "worked 30 years ago selling as is", "like new but untested", etc. etc.). Vintage packing also requires expertise and hefty costs something sellers usually don't want to undertake (I've lost count of how many broken monitors I have received). Yes they could pass the cost on to the buyer but when you are already asking $300 for a run of the mill IBM 5150 you are going to be hard pressed to find someone who is also willing to fork over another $100 to ship it. Those "hassles" you refer to help buyers feel safe in bidding and buying on eBay and probably are essential in some of the high crazy final auction prices you see. Unless you plan to offset those protections somehow (e.g. all items must start at $0.99 auction and bidding increments are locked at $0.25, etc, etc) I don't see buyers rushing to pay large sums of cold hard cash to strangers half a world away without guarantees that are backed by the auction site. Even for the sellers I am not seeing the big draw eBay charges a 10% fee and you want to charge %5. If they are accepting PP for payments well then the buyers have a six month return period and many of the same protections, I mean hassles, as eBay. If people really just want to sell (and not think they have hit the jack pot because they have some tattered boxed non-working monochrome monitor) then the marketplace on the VCF is great. No fees and no headaches for the sellers and for the buyers reasonable to low prices (yeah no one is paying a $1000 for a KB on the marketplace) which is why most sellers don't like it. I would love to see a specialized vintage bazaar where you can find what you want at a reasonable price from trusted sources but the reality is that will never happen in e-commerce. For better and worse eBay has spoiled us and created certain expectation. The only way we could ever have a decent vintage exchange would be to have a swap meet which is of course its own logical nightmare (not to mention the massive over head costs). Just my two worthless cents... -Ali