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That is the beauty of WorthPoint. As long as you are not looking at something that sold 10 years ago. That is Jay’s peeve about WorthPoint. Prices that old are of no value except when dealing with real 100 year old antiques.
I find things on Ebay all the time that only show several in the 90 day sold. And at times those sellers had no idea what they had or just saw one at a low price and then matched theirs to that “low” price. That is what keeps the market prices on some things flat because as I call it, “it is a case on the blind leading the blind, down a dark alley on a moonless night”. I love that saying.
we take the highest price we can find, making sure if the highest was unopned, or still with it’s box, or something that makes it special, and we take those high prices and bump up to about 20% higher. We strive to sell ours at a price higher than the highest of WP. We will become the newest highest seller of solds on WP. We also feel we are doing our part in raising the price points of our items instead of contributing to drive the prices down to a flat point.
It doesn’t work in all cases because of a Sale we may run and then maybe taking an offer on top of that. But by pricing high, we have all the wiggle room in the world to run Sales and take offers and still end up around that WorthPoint High.
Jay has said before and it’s in several of the past audio posts to price high. Then I have asked numerous times on the forums, how high is high and no answers. That is why we came up with that crazy mark-up system we use.
If 90 day solds show 4 items sold all for $20 and I see 3 that sold for $75 on WorthPoint, then I price at about $85, will take offers and run a few sales, hoping to sell at the $65 to $75 range. Now for atleast the next 90 days ours will be the highest sold on Ebay and hopefully some of those people who do not do any research on anything but Ebay will see ours and then price their next item-find closer to the $75. Thus in turn helping to raise those prices instead of lowering them.
Before Jay jumps over onto my monitor, no reasearch on this, just our version of his position of pricing high. Love Jay always saying that. He says price high, so we do!! LOL 🙂 As high as we can if we can support it with not only WorthPoint, but also Kovels. Kovels is the bible of pricing for collectibles. Antique stores, dealers, always have this years Kovels Pricing Guide around. And it is full of photos of how to tell fakes from reals, and also tells if the market is increasing or decreasing. I have seen dealers with 25 years of back copies of Kovels books on their shelves.
we have an annual online subscription and get a lot of our glass, ceramic, and collectibles of interest from them. Much more so than WorthPoint.
Hope this sheds some light on your inquiry…
Mike at MDCG in Atl.
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You are welcome AdvE:.. One of the other interestings things about both is that they both have a dictionary-glossary of makers marks and hallmark stampings. It helps to identify the marks on the bottom of certain pieces. We have thought we had Japanese pcs ins the past and upon further looking and using their marks guides we found out they were Veitnamese charcters.
The fake identification on Kovels helps. We found out the difference between raised “Roseville” letters [embossed], and recessed “Roseville” letters [de-bossed]. One is the real way Roseville marked their pottery and the ones made in fake molds. After learning that we can now identify the fakes from the reals at auctions within half a second.
Kovels also provides a lot of history on real old pices. When the factory came into being, who founded it, how long in business, when they went out of business or if they were bought up like Fenton and the new owners started re-making the Fenton pieces using the old molds. all very handy things to know if you start to move into the higher collectibles.
Case in point. I am researching a Moser piece we got Sunday. Look up Moser Decanters and see the price ranges. We got this piece for $30 bucks, so now my job is find out if we have the one worths thousands or hundreds but most are all over $450. Not bad for $30 bucks.But will definitely use both WorthPoint and Kovels along with some auction houses to Research.
Think you will find them a “professional tool”. I also said, professional tools for professional people being used in a professional manner. [another one of my sayings I like to quote to the employees, especially when they wanted me to buy them expensive equipment].
you know who, from you know where … 🙂
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From day one we started putting mney into the business. Just like a corp. start up loan, we started using anything we thought would help us succeed. We are too old to wait for years to figure things out. Don’t have that much time to spare. It’s kick start the business and have some fun doing it or not.
We have probably had Worthpoint for 5-6 years. Kovels about as long, only we used to buy the annual published book. Big oversized book about 2.5″ thick.
We also strated building our infrastructure rather quickly also. We bought storage cabinets, bins, shelving, printers, 2 computers, etsy store subscription, Shopify store subscription, have a full working art-painting studio combined with wood working and framing shop [600 sq. ft.], fully working separate admin. office/shipping area 320 SF], and if the house next door became available we would consider maybe grabbing that up.
We started out running 6 antique booths at the largest antique mall east of the Mississippi River in Monroe, GA. at $90 each per month. Within 3 years we knew that was a lousy business model. Only person making money at those places are the landlords.
I and wife Susan both fully retired over 2 years ago and then being an entreprenuer type I knew I would just prefer to work my own business and do something Susan and I could do together and do day or weekend trips. So we came out of the shoot running, growing and plow back investing in the company.
We had 3-4 thousand items in the booths but when we went to the online venues we begin to shed off all of the low end, non quality stuff. We used to have one and two dollar items in the booth. not any more. I have posted in the past how we went through tons of death piles after pulling everything out of the booths. we sent close to a 600-700 large, non-shippable furniture and table type items to a local auction house and moved the rest home. Then slowly sorted through them and donated what we didn’t want. we ended up with about a thousand items which we thought was worth time to list. Now for the past several years we have been listening here at SL, working our business, learning more all the time and if something is going to cost us a few dollars a month, we go for it. At almost 70 years old, I am not going to waste 3 or 4 more years trying to figure out if something will help. We do it, use it and if not a fit then we dump it.
So, we went into it knowing we would invest in our future years and we had several smaller sources of income that carried us. We of course have Susan’s and my retirement money monthly / Social Security [for what that is worth], we have a 1,200 sq. ft. full kitchen, 2 bedroom basement apt. we rent out, I sell some art locally and we now have the online venues.
And to date we owe nobody, but boy do we have some money tied up in Glass and Brass 🙂 we call it in inventory. But our unit Cost per item has come way down over the last few years and our avg. selling prices have gone up.
So there you have our crazy story in a nutshell. We aren’t scavenging to get to retirement, we are scavenging to STAY in retirement!!
mike at MDCG in Atl.
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Agree with Mike…both on the value of Worthpoint and Kovels (I don’t have the subscription to Kovel’s probably should, but I have lots of the annual volumes). Also agree that it’s important to bring a healthy skepticism to ebay sold prices….I don’t follow Mike’s guidelines exactly, but for a lot of things, I do go high compared to the solds, especially when my gut tells me that the solds are the result of sellers not knowing how to value what they have. For most stuff, my framework is basically: 1. Accept that I WILL sometimes make mistakes, and sell some stuff lower than I should. 2. Research to minimize those occasions as much as possible.
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hi Mike, I’m learning a lot from you- all over the forum topics. You have a lot of expertise- Thank you-
I noticed your comment about the house next door- well it just happened to us! My neighbor told me they were going to sell the house and move south full time, so we are buying the house and starting an airBNB in the house and using the wood shop as the ebay business (About 400 sf)- I’m retired and my wife works full time…for now….here we go!
stay well
sally
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