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Worthpoint says you got $23K for it. No wonder you can’t stay away from auctions, both attending live ones and using them on eBay. 🙂
Kenny, a sniping strategy I use sometimes when I’m in the mood is I pick a Collectibles or Antiques subcategory I feel like browsing and sort for Ending Soon on the entire subcategory. I refine for Auction, and US Only. This works best on off times like early weekday mornings. I don’t bother with this on a Sunday night. I don’t use a keyword because half the fun is finding poorly titled items that have been ignored. There are tens of thousands of auctions ending every day in some of these subcategories. The odds are astronomical that you’ll be bidding against me so have at it!
Thanks for the analysis, Kenny. I’m doing that right now with a rarer Swatch watch. Jay we’re with you for BIN as an everyday strategy and I use it sometimes in situations like Kenny describes. If it might be worth $2000 just put it up for that and wait to see what happens. But it is harder for me because my store is small enough that I’m well aware of the items that have been sitting for a while. I lose patience. It’s really hard to list it and forget it with a smaller number of items active at a time so I end up doing a variation on the Dutch auction. After a couple months I’ll keep dropping the price on items I think are pie in the sky. I do stick to my guns when I have confidence in my price.
Uh – I shouldn’t have clicked on that. My cats are going crazy looking around here for those kittens. One just stuck his head in the printer.
Meh. There’s one in every neighborhood, isn’t there? Well, no. Pretty unique, I’d say.
I would naturally try to picture the owner(s) but I don’t think I want to go there.
Welcome Kenny! You may regret admitting you work for an auction here 🙂
I love auctions and would love being a ringman. Congrats on quitting your crap job!
ThriftShift have fun in TAP class if you can stay awake. What you don’t wanna chase ambulances? I think I told them I wanted to pump gas at a marina, but only if they didn’t make me wear shoes. That didn’t go over well either.
I have to confess I continued to practice law but never much liked it and was happy to finally get out of that game. Congratulations on your retirement!
I sell used – very different than selling new items in many ways. I very rarely use auctions, only for specific strategies like Amatino, or CraigslistHunter’s technique of setting a high BIN for items difficult to price and then dropping them into auction if many watchers are accumulated and I want a quick sale.
I agree with pretty much all that has been said. My personal take on the indispensable boot camp basics for new scavenger-type sellers, having sniped many an item from them over the years:
– How to pack and ship a variety of items. I have received countless poorly packed and damaged items from eBay sellers over the years, and have seen where sellers have paid way too much for shipping for not choosing the best method for size, weight, and destination. It hurts them directly if selling with free shipping, and takes money out of their pockets on the realized sale price if charging too much for shipping because they don’t know any better.
– How to take good, well-lit photos, including identifying marks and hallmarks, and take as many as needed to show everything a buyer wants to see.
– How to research items. How to look at a history of sold similar items (on eBay and elsewhere) and getting a sense of why there might be a large price range and learning how to distinguish what is valuable data and what is not.
– How to write good descriptions. Laziness in condition specifics will come back to haunt them. The use of high selling examples from their research to use the right key words to get the best price for their items.New sellers’ failures in these last three points especially, along with using low-start auctions, have resulted in many very good buys for me.
Right now when I click on subcategory Collectibles / Collectibles Wholesale Lots / Other Collectibles Wholesale Lots (selected for “US only” to keep out the new China junk) there are 13,193 active and 13,016 sold listings (assuming eBay is showing me all of the listings, which they may not be). On sold listings, it’s about 75/25 BIN/Auction. You can refine the search in Other Collectibles for Coins, Knives, Silver, Watches, “Junk”, etc.
But Figurines, Flags, Knives, Lighters, Pins & Buttons, Postcards and Paper all have their own subcategories also at the same level as Other Collectibles.
It’s the Wild Wild West in there, a very interesting place. Many of the lots with “junk drawer” in the title aren’t so junky and go for hundreds of dollars.
Thanks AdventureE and sonia but I think what Sharyn is asking about is outgoing offers. I’ve got the same problem – I recently sent out a couple “reply with offer” messages in response to messages and I can find no record of them anywhere. They don’t show in Offers and the outgoing message does not show up in Sent Messages. There is a note on the incoming message that I replied to the message, but there is no link to my reply.
Hi, Alex. Full disclosure: I’m a part timer so I don’t have the experience of volume, but I have been buying and selling on eBay for over 20 years so I think I know a good listing when I see it. I agree with Sonia – the pictures look great. I’ve been looking at your items trying to pick apart your listings but I’m not having any luck. I’d say you’re doing everything right, I don’t see any balls being dropped. Overall your store is a class act – very professional.
Since J&R turned their blog into a multi-page forum, sometimes things that are posted off the main page aren’t viewed much. I know you just posted this today and you may get more responses eventually, but I would recommend posting on the main weekly Episode page using Jay’s “post your numbers” format and ask there for some more critiques on your store and you will get some ideas from different perspectives. Do it early in the week for maximum exposure to the collective.
Lastly, you’ll see I’m close by in DC, Southeast to be exact. But I just moved here this past summer and again I’m just part time and I have not been to any auctions yet. (I worked here for a while years ago but lived in Annapolis so I would go to markets and auctions on the Eastern Shore.) I would just do a google search or even yellow pages, plus there are probably some in the area that are online. I do have long and varied experience with auctions having been into antiques, picking, and scavenging on the side for 20 years before eBay and I would not recommend taking kids. There’s too much going on and you need to be able to concentrate and focus on the bidding during the auction, and then checking out after and getting your stuff and packing up can be a zoo. The best auctions for buying are the weekday auctions anyway, and they’re all business and would not appreciate the kids.
I have never heard that GSP specifically provides the benefit of your items showing up on the foreign eBay sites. Have you found that written somewhere in eBay’s policies?
I do not use GSP but I have been interested in how listing for foreign eBay sites works because a significant portion of my sales go outside the country and I would be interested in increasing that. When listing I have the option of including eBay UK, if I want to pay extra, but that’s the only foreign site that shows up as an option. I have never opted to do that and I can only assume that my foreign sales come from buyers who are registered on eBay USA.
I have gone on the foreign sites and my brief research leads me to believe that there is no rhyme or reason to what US listings show on those sites. For example I have found multiple US listings on the UK site that do not offer international shipping at all. My listings don’t show up on the UK site, but do show up on the French site and the Italian site, for example.
One other quirk is that eBay does not guarantee that your listings will show up in every search every time for your item. Ebay reserves the right not to show your listings sometimes “in the interests of the optimum buyer experience” or something like that.
You should call eBay though and see if they have any explanation.
Thanks for the BOLO! Every once in a while I fall back into the bad habit of not researching the current values for something if I think it looks cheap or if I’ve seen hundreds of the same type of item over the years languishing at flea markets etc. But I have frequently regretted that, and have just as frequently thanked myself for overcoming my laziness and researching something I was not going to bother with. My mantra: Always research. I say again: Always research. Never forget it: Always research.
