Ebay Tyrants!
Added 2022-03-08 19:20:02 +0000 UTCEbay is just like social media - in the early days it was a free and open place to exchange interesting things... But now it's a place where people love to display their hoards of precious bounty - with no desire to actually sell any of it. But hey - they'd sure love for you to be the sucker!!
Comments
I am a CD & Vinyl collector. I understand the problem. We should clarify that for any "piece" it could exist a market or it couldn't. It is not true any more that the price is decided by the market. If several people want it, the price raises; if nobody wants it, the price goes down. That was an old concept valid in the sales area. eBay can contains rare goods that are so odds and particular that "have no market" and you can find one or two customers interested in them in months or years. This do not means they have no value. The seller who owns them, has no hurry at all to sell: it is probably like a collector. His collection could stays for years as it is in his warehouse. He has his own price idea and he will never sells it for a lower price, even if it will keep it for the rest of his life. Another example: you have an emerald to sell. So, just because it is an emerald, it will worth thousands of dollars. - Does it have a market ? Naaaaaa... There are thousands of Goldsmith shops full of emeralds all around the world, and they have items in all the prices ranges. The issue is that with current crisis THERE ARE NO PEOPLE with the money availability to purchase them. There are no queue of people looking for their emerald in the shops. But this does not means that since there are no people interested the emeralds, the emeralds are sold to few dollars.... There is no market ? The price stay the same. May be that one of the few still rich, will still go in a shop or on eBay and will purchase an emerald at thousands dollar price. But for sure, NOBODY will be able to purchase an emerald at 3$ just because there is no market and nobody was doing offers since months. The 'giveaway' concept is ended..... The same for the Films, same for the Vinyls.
Roberto Coli
2022-03-09 15:52:36 +0000 UTCThe more buyers there are on Ebay, the better the chances that some buyer will pay a "crazy" price for any given item. That's market discipline. If a seller overprices, they'll pay in the form of carrying cost.
Michael S Wilhelm
2022-03-09 02:31:51 +0000 UTCYep. The very public realisation of the true value of some things, has taken us from a world where people thought everything was junk and not worth anything, to a world where every single damn odd thing is priced thru the roof, assuming that in a global market someone somewhere will pay for it. Gone are the days of walking into a Pawn shop and buying a Minimoog for $120
Dan Elleson
2022-03-09 02:07:39 +0000 UTCThis all begins to sound like the fine art world, where collectors bid on their own paintings in order to maintain their perceived value, even if it results in no sale. maybe having items listed for sale on eBay at a price acts like a yardstick to value other similar items by. So that actual item doesn't need to be sold - in fact it can't be sold or another one will have to be listed to maintain the perceived value! One thing I discovered by chance is that buy-it-now prices can be quite fictitious if there's also a 'make offer' button. A seller had a rare 70s calculator up for £400, way above what i could afford but there hadn't been another one on eBay for a few years. I just contacted the seller to say that I loved the machine but could not insult him with a low offer. In the end he got me to admit how much I might be able to pay for it - £250 - and he agreed immediately. So immediately that I suspected even that was way too high, but no more have come up for sale since so I don't actually know.
Ymir the Frost Giant
2022-03-09 01:43:55 +0000 UTCYeah, Ebay doesn't make much sense any longer. Here's what confused me... One seller in the Avionics category keeps relisting the same lot of stuff month after month for years. Literally, the exact same listings for YEARS! His stuff is priced above absurd by any measure, never listed lower and it's all junk someone would have to pay ME to deal with. Why do I care? Well, it's because whenever he relists the same batch of rotten fruit, it takes up pages and pages of eBay space that has to be scrolled through to get to the new listings. The shipping charge problem seems to be what some sellers depend on instead of the actual value of the item. So many technical things are described incorrectly, or associated with NASA but have no documents, or sticker residue from NASA property tags. I never thought about trying to buy 16mm films. How do the sellers even know if it's not already owned by some company? I don't think some alternate version of Star Wars exists on some priceless reel of 16mm film. I won't even BEGIN to talk about all the ICs from China that are bogus, reprinted, counterfeit or just simply dead. Even if they refund your money, you're still probably in the same situation when you bought the chips. Except now they've wasted your TIME and that's a resource that can't be priced. And you go on to hunt for more expensive sellers in hopes that you don't get more bogus parts. Very frustrating! Not what it was 20+ years ago.
Matt Wietlispach
2022-03-09 00:25:11 +0000 UTCI love Frants! On this topic - Ebay shipping charges are a total scam...'That's fer sure, that's fer dang sure'.
Bruce Rose
2022-03-08 23:38:56 +0000 UTCGlad to see a "Frant" return! ... I checked and I first registered for eBay in July 1998. I'm fortunate to have a local electronics recycler and a surplus industrial supplier that have eBay stores, so I can save on shipping big things by picking stuff up, and their prices are sometimes good.
Jason Olshefsky
2022-03-08 19:53:53 +0000 UTC
