eBay disaster - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

7 Apr 2010

...

 Date: Tue, 6 Apr 2010 19:54:27 +0100 (BST)
 From: ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk (Tony Duell) 
...
  I haev found it's impossible to predict the prices
that things will sell
 for on E-bay. Several times I've seen things with an opening bid of
 perhaps $5. I've thoguht that it was a rare an interesting item and put
 in a bid of $100 for it (and ecpected it to go for a lot more), only to
 find I end up winning it for the opening bid. Conversely there have been
 times when I've thought 'nobody will want that' and put in a sensible (if
 somewhat low) bid, only  to find it sells for much more. 
Time also plays a part, as in, who happens to be looking for that type of
item and how many.   What sells for very little one month may go for
hundreds a month later.

I designed and ran off some circuit boards for 16 MB Macintosh IIfx SIMMs
and offered sets of four (64 MB RAM total) on Ebay.   The first set sold
for over $270.   As one would expect, the price declined from there until
it went under $50 which was about what I felt was my minimum considering
the effort to assemble them.   The second to last set sold for about $50
and the set that made me quit went for about $25.

Then I waited a month or two, offered them again with exactly the same
auction listing and the price was back up over $120.

It's like there's a customer-base refresh function at work or at least a
time variant demand function.

Jeff Walther