Periodic rants on eBay

-----Original Message----- From: owner-classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org [mailto:owner-classiccmp@classiccmp.org]On Behalf Of Mike Ford Sent: Thursday, October 25, 2001 10:09 AM To: classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org Subject: Periodic rants on eBay Love it or hate it, eBay is the most credible source of pricing or value that I know of. Last night, really the past week, I have been digging deeply into the purchases I have made in the last few months, and I found a really cool looking box, HP SureStore 12000e. 10 minutes on the HP site, and I knew all about the buttons on the front, but not what the damn thing WAS. 2 minutes on eBay and I knew I had a nice 48 GB DDS tape array storage thing worth $175 or so, that had drivers for windows etc. that I could download for free (and had the links to do so in the eBay ad). Yes, I agree about ebay being a knowledge base as well as a place to sell. I've learned a lot from browsing through the ads, and it's also a good place to see pictures of items that I'm curious about. Sure, most of the photos are terrible but if all you want to do is see what something looks like, then it's helpful. About pricing though, it gives you a general idea of what something is worth on the open market but it's also very much a hit and miss kind of thing. For example, a while back I saw an Apple 3.5 unidisk drive sell for about $100.00. Suddenly, five more drives appear from various sellers who see that they have a hot item, and in essence the market is then flooded. That causes the price to fall on drives offered after that. So what is the value of one of those drives? Also, the more an items is listed (like an Apple IIe) the better the statistical data becomes. Some will say that the value of an item is exactly what someone will pay for it at a particular time, and that's true but you can also say that generally speaking, an item's approximate value is what people will likely pay for it. An Altair will likely sell for more than $1000 but how much more? If I try to sell an Apple II clone on ebay, one day it will go for $30 and the next it might go for $70.00 depending on who sees it. What is it's approximate value? If I start the auction a $1.00, the bidding might end at $100.00 but if I start it at $30.00, the auction might end at $32.00. I know, I'm rambling again but I've been thinking about ebay strategies lately because I'm about to post a bunch of stuff there. Does anyone have any useful selling tips based on their own experiences -aside from the obvious (photos.)