Home › Forums › Buying and Selling › Selling on eBay › When Things are over Priced and get sold anyway
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old_man_marty.
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09/05/2021 at 10:02 am #92929
When researching prices, I’ve notice a few sellers on line that have small inventories that are SUPER marked up AND appear to sell anyway. Do you think they have a clientel who ins’t smart enough to figure out they are being duped? Or do you think the sellers are buying their own items to inflate their values.
I realize this is illegal and I am not interested in persuing, just curious how that scam would work. I would think that in order to get away with it with regularity, you would have to pay the fees to eBay.
Anyone thoughts on this?
For an example search Food For Freedom Patch. (I don’t want to post a link thereby calling this person out directly – for all I know I could be mistaken and everything could be above board).
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09/05/2021 at 10:36 am #92931
Sharyn made a good point that it could be an in-person estate sale who has an eBay store to print fake “sold items”. We’ve all been to the sales where the person has a printed paper from eBay saying its worth so much.
So the store isn’t actually selling anything. It’s a hype machine.
Not sure if eBay would do anything as long as the person is paying fees?
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09/05/2021 at 10:53 am #92932
I just think those fees will get expensive after a while. That patch I referenced is priced at $400 that’s a $50 advertising fee. I guess if you make 200 it works but that feels like a pretty big outlay of capital
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09/05/2021 at 10:58 am #92935
Yeah, maybe they buy and then cancel? I assume eBay would take action if someone just cancelled all sales.
I have no other hypotheses other than some people may just be able to sell weird items for high because they know the collector market well?
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09/05/2021 at 11:05 am #92936
I looked at that person’s store, active and solds. Looks like they are specializing in WWI & WWII patches. I’m assuming they know they can sell for this high. Their completed listings show lots of high dollar sales on those. Like Jay said, they are in a very niche market.
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09/05/2021 at 1:42 pm #92938
My theory, wait, hypothesis, is that someone makes a listing at a high price and has a friend buy it and cancel. The solds on eBay then don’t show that the sale was canceled, and it looks as if that item has a high value. I “heard” that this happened several years back when there was a big run on Disney classic VHS tapes, which were really widely available.
The patch seller might be knowledgeable, and this item might actually be worth it. They could be an expert on their niche, they might have an online following where people are willing to spend more, etc. Maybe there are buyers out there who just want to make someone’s day. We really can’t say.
Well before I became a reseller, I would peruse eBay listings for unusual items; just for entertainment, I guess. I recall a few where people needed money, and they would post something cheap, give their sob story, and ask for a ridiculous amount of money. I don’t know if that happens any more. I haven’t really looked. I don’t think that is the case here. Just throwing it out there.
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09/05/2021 at 2:57 pm #92940
I just sold an NBC TV show on DVD for $60 – 1 disc. Sounds crazy but the comps went as high as $100 but the average was around $50-$60.
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09/08/2021 at 5:26 pm #93026
Dvd and vhs are on the way up. People want to get away from streaming for various reasons. Music gets changed, content edited, etc. a lot of people in rural areas can’t stream too.
I recently sold a sealed carol burnett dvd set for $70.
a complete set of Big Bang theory for $60.
there’s money in dem Dere piles of media.-
09/08/2021 at 6:31 pm #93028
Nice! I’m going to definitely keep that in mind as I come across them.
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09/08/2021 at 8:59 pm #93029
@martyholthaus (and anyone else who likes to sell media)
One of the best places to pick up media for low prices are library sales. I use this site to find the sales close to me. Most libraries just want to clear space so everything is priced very low. It’s true scavenging, tables and piles and boxes of books and media and anything else that might get donated to a library. Some sales are really well organized and others not so much. Pre-covid these sales were getting more and more overrun by Amazon sellers, easy to spot with their handheld scanners. But a lot of the sales in New Jersey have been good about enforcing social distancing and masks which cuts down on the Amazon dorks and makes the whole experience a lot more pleasant.
This was my old niche before I went heavy into cards, so if anyone is interested I would love to discuss it more. Since streaming services add and drop content all the time, media will remain a profitable niche until some new technology makes it obsolete, especially for rare and hard to find stuff. Like anything else, you have to do your research. It’s easy to find something rare but harder to find something rare that will actually sell.
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09/08/2021 at 9:18 pm #93030
Cool. I got some DVDs and CDs from my mother-in-law and was surprised to find a few gems when I checked prices. But, you never know. Over the years I have sold a few and, for the most part, I would say mini-series and multiple disc collections are the best. Re-mastered classics might fit in that group. Not always – but I use it as a basic generalization.
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09/05/2021 at 3:43 pm #92942
@ Jay & ryanne well I picked up one of those patched for 50 cents. So guess I will put it up for auction and see what happens….
@Sharynn I looked at comps for this item on worthpoint and over the last 10 years they have sold for 5 to 35 bucks each. So this should be an interesting experiment.
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09/05/2021 at 8:44 pm #92951
There is a notorious sports card seller who specializes in a few particular expensive modern football card sets (flawless and national treasures are the set names) and this seller lists individual cards in their store for exponentially more than similar cards. A buy it now of hundreds or thousands for a card that I might sell for $50 to $100, and from what I’ve read they don’t negotiate much if at all. This seller has over 14,000 items listed and sells maybe five items a month. Their eBay store is basically a museum. If you want one of their cards for your collection, you can either pay their extremely inflated prices or find it from another seller.
It is definitely the same thing with this seller’s Food for Freedom and other rare war patches. From the description of one of their sold listings:
I will be selling my personal collection which boastingly makes up one of the nicest WW2 Home Front collections of patches ever assembled. You can view most of my collection on the US Militaria Forum under Home Front & the War Effort on the thread “Home Front Patches” with over 131,000 views! Whenever possible, I always upgraded my patches so anything in my collection is top of the line.
I will not be discounting patches from my personal collection. The BIN price is what it is set at. These prices are what the rarity of these patches have seen or should be from watching eBay since 2005 since I started collecting.<b></b>
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09/05/2021 at 9:30 pm #92952
That’s it! These eBay sellers are like walking into junk shops where the sellers don’t really want to sell so they price everything super high. Maybe its a form of hoarding with a great cover story?
At one of these stores, I remember being willing to buy an item at their price, and he decided he didn’t want to sell it.
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09/06/2021 at 2:45 am #92954
I did the rounds of a car boot sale yesterday. I picked up a British “turtle” army helmet, asked the price and was told £15, then the seller immediately dropped the price to £10. I bought it, then I went on to another stall and picked out a Georgian shell cameo brooch priced at £38. I was going to offer £30 when the seller said the price was actually £16. Bought that, went home, checked eBay and found that I’d probably paid the going rate for both items. That’s the eBay rate; another site had a similar but poorer-quality brooch for £120.
eBay, the best deals at the lowest prices.
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09/06/2021 at 10:23 am #92970
there could be a few different theories at play.
Do you want to sell 100 patches at $5 each? or Would you rather sell 10 patches at $50 each? I’d go for the quality over quantity business model
and Jay mentioned one…basically listing your hobby collection at high prices. … because you’re really not keen to sell but if someone wants to pay the high price then why not??
another is establishing a brand or pedigree. It happens in golden and silver age comics. Basically, a large high quality collection comes to market and due to the amazing condition (and of course scarcity in that condition) the collection is given a name. These comics then command a much higher price due to the pedigree.
or, the person just thinks all of their stuff is worth a lot more then what shows on Ebay and their price is their price.
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09/06/2021 at 8:10 pm #92992
I would guess with this patch guy, he’s very knowledgeable in his area and has established a small clientele in that particular niche. He probably knows the provenance of all his patches since they are in his personal collection, whereas a normal reseller might not. He obviously doesn’t sell a ton of volume, but it doesn’t look like he really wants to, either. He’s playing the long-tail game to the extreme. In a specialized area like war patches, for some buyers, price may be secondary to provenance and condition.
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09/07/2021 at 5:07 am #92997
Maybe there’s some kind of universal principle here. I couldn’t do a van Meegeren and paint a few fake Old Masters, but- after a couple of years research and a small investment- I could start knocking out fake patches, with the correct dyes and materials. As they do in Vietnam, using the reference books on field-made patches to improve the product.
So price would be secondary to provenance and condition, in a market where the item can easily be faked.
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09/08/2021 at 4:03 pm #93023
@antique-frog — there is a great documentary about the art forger Mark Landis called Art and Craft which I thought was incredibly well done
There is also a huge number of fake rare and $$$$ expensive modern cards, most from the beginning of the era from 20-25 years ago when companies were just starting to create innovations like foil stamping, die cutting and serial numbering which are so prized by modern card collectors. The most valuable basketball cards from the late 1990s are especially likely to be fake since there is a massive demand for them in Asia, primarily China and Japan. Many of these fakes are so well done that even professional graders don’t catch them. It is astounding to see the level of knowledge and analysis that collector detectives use to show exactly how and why these cards were faked.
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09/08/2021 at 11:15 pm #93032
@craig-rex Thanks! I came across a PBS page that had three Landis fakes side-by-side with the originals (Mark or the Master?) Apparently feet are the most difficult part of the human body to paint; the “Watteau” shows that even if you’re copying a painting it’s still difficult!
I would have thought the card fakers maybe had copies of the original Quark Xpress files or equivalent, which would give the correct colour separations and trapping (to prevent unsightly overlaps), but that thread suggests that there are only a few high-value cards that were faked because “producing these high-end counterfeits is extremely time consuming and expensive”. If they’re done from scans of originals, there’s probably going to be some artefacts introduced by the anti-aliasing of the scanner software.
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09/08/2021 at 11:41 pm #93033
That is amazing! You know your stuff. Really cool info. Thanks.
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