20 Nov
2006
20 Nov
'06
7:06 a.m.
On Sun, 19 Nov 2006, dwight elvey wrote:
Some people want to price an item ( see what people
are willing to pay
). Some people have another buyer that will meet that price. Some
believe they have a valuable item.
With as picky and jaded as many buyers have gotten over time, I honestly
don't see how a seller would think they'd get a fair market evaluation
with a reserve price. You are far better off just watching the market for
several months.
I rarely bid on a reserve item unless I really want
it. Sellers often
miss the fact that if they start the auction at a lower price, they get
several people interested in the item. These people will often start
bidding against each other. With a reserve, many will quite early, even
if they are only a few dollors away from the reserve. They just get
frustrated.
From the selling side, its a gamble. Sometimes those
items won't go high,
sometimes they will. For some of the tooling I use, I
monitor and
sometimes buy the stuff that is going for far too little. Often I keep the
item for my own use, but sometimes I'll resell it later, it just depends
on if its something I really need or not. Heck, a good photo and well
written listing can make a huge difference in the selling price of an
item. Professional buyers are also pretty good at spotting a copy and
paste listings.
Sellers also should not start there titles with things
like "vintage" or
"rare". The people that will most likely pay a good price already know
how rare an item is and what they should bid for it. Those two
adjectives rarely cause a bidder to bid higher and often even cause the
knowledgeable bidder to miss seeing the auction ( not good for the
seller ). Many have a lot to scan and wasted words, like these that are
commonly used, just hide the actual item. It is hard enough to scan
hunderds of items without all the noise. I doubt anyone bids on an iten
because someone said it was rare.
As both a buyer and seller, things like 'rare' and 'LQQK' really get on my
nerves. With the listings I create, I usually have a hard time not going
over the character limit (55 currently) as it is when I'm using *good*
keywords. I dunno why sellers waste all those characters for words that
won't really help sell something.
I recently picked up a Olivetti M20 for less then
$130, including
shipping because it was poorly advertised. If the seller had stated that
it was a Z8000 machine he may have gotten better response. It just
looked like any other PC of that age. As I recall, the title started
with something like "vintage". I'd have not seen it if it wasn't for
the
fact that I was doing searches for Olivetti's.
Yikes...most of that must have been the shipping too, as those things
aren't exactly lightweight :)
-Toth