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Good day, Fine people of the internet.
My Vietnamese neighbors through out an enormous collection of Vietnamese CDs and DVDs. About a foreign food’s store worth (immigrants will hopefully understand the reference – I’m relying on memories of my little Russian food stores and their little Russian language media collections by the counter). I love collections like nothing else, since no matter what it is, I can be sure that someone will buy a lot of a single type of thing for a reasonable thing. So, not speaking Vietnamese, I thought that selling them as a CD lot and a DVD lot would be best. But when I started researching Vietnamese CDs, my head exploded. Most listings sell – which alone is very uncommon for media – and REGULARLY for a range between $40-$150. Many have gotten astronomically high: $400-$700. I can’t understand what the hell is going, and how I should go about selling my own. Surely I should list them individually, but there is only selling history of about 700 listings: not nearly enough market information, especially if there’s potential for individual CDs to sell for as high as $700. Should I put them up on individual auction? The really high prices were all achieved through auction. And is this even real, or could this be money laundering or some other naughty thing? Russian media never achieves anything like this.
I would appreciate any insight, especially from someone with experience selling foreign media.
https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?LH_Complete=1&_from=R40&_sacat=0&_nkw=vietnamese+CD&_sop=13
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I don’t have any insight into media foreign or otherwise, but I thought that I would offer one suggestion. You can find inexpensive translation services through different websites. I used fiverr.com recently for something else, so I checked them out for translation. I found several offers for Vietnamese to English translation. The first one offered 800 words for $5, and they look like they had good credentials. Just like eBay, you should check their ratings and compare to other offers. There are other sites like upwork.com, and you could google for others.
If you had the translation, you could compare what you have to others that have sold.
Of course, you could ask your neighbors, but I assume you don’t want to clue them in to what you are planning to do. Maybe you could not say anything about rescuing stuff from their trash, but casually ask about what sort of CDs and DVDs they had thrown out.
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If you have Siri on an Apple Device, it will use Shazam on foreign music and give you some information.
Another thing I do with foreign items is look at other eBay websites for information – it may not be on eBay.com, but maybe show up on eBay.co.uk or eBay.com.au etc. to help figure out what you have.
Then there is always what I call a “Hail Mary” where I have something cool, don’t know about it completely, but still list it with a guess at the value. My problem is these items either sell in 5 minutes, or never at the price I set.
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It’s all about time.. how much time do you want to invest in those items.
When I research German Books.. in German, I go on my Chrome browser and then to Ebay.DE. I can click my mouse and I have the option of translating the entire Ebay page to English. It is very slow to research each item.
Where are your buyers ? In the USA or elsewhere. If they’re in they’re in the US, then just research on Ebay from the US.
By the time you are done, you will be somewhat of an expert on This CD’s and DVD’s,
Good Luck and a caveat to everyone else.. be careful what you wish for. I’m still working on my lot of antique books I bought months ago.
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so cal joe, my German is pretty bad, but I might be able to save you some time on those…
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I appreciate that. I’m finding out that old German books seem to be in as much demand as old US books. It’s about scarcity and condition. Even first editions aren’t necessarily valuable.
I’ve got some early Thomas Mann books. I’ve got four signed books by Oscar Maria Graf. The rest are fairly generic and I just run searches to find out which ones are going to be donated or listed. I’ve also got a couple of books signed by Zoosman. At least I believe they are signed. Those are intriguing.
Part of the same lot are books in English. The signed ones and first editions get my attention first. After that it’s a matter of filtering out the rest. Some I’ll donate and others sell in groups or lots.
Thanks..
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I don’t know anything about Vietnamese CD’s, but I have seen a single used CD sell for $500 in the past, so high values are certainly possible.
I also do not think you need to translate anything. As long as you have the artist name spelled correctly that should be sufficient.
Money laundering is a possibility, but one way you can check that is to list one of those high value CD’s yourself and see if you get the same price. I saw some single CD’s sell for $400+ on that link you provided.
This certainly seems like a “too good to be true” situation. I’m sure if those high sold values are legit someone else would have figured out how to source those CD’s in Vietnam and have them sent to the USA. If no one has figured out (importing) yet then this could be a temporary arbitrage opportunity until someone DOES, so take the cash and run.
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