Is it me or is ebay just?

handyman

Is it me or does it seem like ebay has turned into a get rick quick idea. Everyone seems to be buying items and then listend them the same day for 50% more than what they paid. Im seeing more PSA cards listed not as an auction but with a very high first bid. Nobody seems to trust the auction idea. It seems even if they have a rare item. Just an example a PSA 10 1974 Unitas buy it now for 2000.00. Maybe fair. But come on. Im seeing more and more of this. Yes a few PSA items have made crazy prices and I think people feel it should happen everytime. Just list it and let it go. Your 5.00 ungraded card will sell for 100%'s more that what its worth raw. Im just not happy with ebay in the last 2 years. The buy it now and ebay stores are taking over. And im seeing less sales and lower prices on cards bc of it. I normally spend 3,000 a month on cards and in the last year Ive only spent on average 1000 a month bc I dont like the majority of auctions being buy it now or high priced starting bids.
Just my rant!

storm888

MANY sellers got tired of giving their items away
for the opening bid. Thus, more and more BINs
at higher prices.


Traffic is way down on EBAY, and the auction addicts
have moved-on to other things. BINs and stores are
the future of EBAY; if it has a future.

viking7

I can see handymans point from a buyers perspective but from a sellers point of view "just list it and let it go" doesn't always work.

thedutymon

Good day,
Let me add a little from my perspective. Having dealt on E-bay for 10 years now, here is what I've seen especially as it pertains to PSA stuff. When I started to collect PSA graded stuff 5 years ago I could buy a nice set or large lot of cards in high grade and submit them and when I got them back could almost always count on keeping what I wanted for my sets and then putting the rest on E-bay and they would almost always sell for enough to offset or get close what I had spent. This way I could build my stuff and not have to spend super amounts. In the last couple of years this model has bit the dust. I could tell you dozens and dozens of stories of paying Top dollar for the same type and condition of cards and then when listing them on E-Bay ending up selling them for less than the price of the cards and eating the submission fees. And I'm talking NM-MT 8's and MINT 9's, not some EX 5's. It has got to the point that I no longer just automatically submit every High Grade card from a large lot I pick up. I now and for the foreseeable future will continue to basically only submit the ones that I need for my sets and then sell the rest of the lot Raw.
Where I think this is going to have a effect long term is in the fact that there are going to be less and less graded stuff for the collector who doesn't submit to PSA. I am not the only one who has adopted this stance as I can see this in a lot of my fellow Non Sport Collectors/Submitters. And in all honesty I am glad for it, as I am tired of spending time and money to give away cards. Hopefully as this trend develops there will be less and less graded cards for sale in specific areas and this can only help to drive the price back up to reasonableness.
So as to why the high BIN prices or starting bids, it's simple economics, if I am going to take a bath on a card, why bother. If I have $25 bucks into a card and grading, and I can't give it away for $5 bucks than I have felt at times like just throwing it away. Seriously !!! Or what I usually do is start another set with them and the affect is they still are not on the market and I hope the end effect is the same. So its not about getting rich quick, just simple economics.
Neil

CDsNuts

Everything has become so "nichey" that it's gotten to the point where if you list a card in a 7 day auction, the people who might really want the card probably won't see it, and it goes for way under what the seller considers market value. If you list it in your store at a reasonable, or even high BIN, the guy who really wants it will eventually stumble upon it in his searches. It makes way more sense financially to list it in your store than it does to risk it going for way less than you can get for it.

As long as sellers see that they get more for cards by listing them at a BIN rather than at auction, that's what they're going to do.

Lee

RipublicaninMass

I did suprisingly well buying 1955 topps PSA 8's on ebay and making a small profit again through ebay. Sometimes stuff gets lost. However some of my stuff used to get lost as well, so I need to start my bidding about 75% of what I am willing to take. Just listing for 99 cents and go has been tough times. I don't agree that a Vintage PSA 5 should sell for less than the cost of grading. I will be happy to pick up huge lots of vintage psa 5's at 5 bucks a piece. I think Beckett's price guide has really hurt the vintage raw commons as well. Aside from only pricing them one every 4 months, the prices they do post are ridiculous. 20 years ago I was paying about 12$ for ex-mty 55 topps commons for my set. Now that are priced I think at about 5 dollars in Becketts. Not that anyone even reads that magazine anymore, but I was physically ill when I learned I had to buy a quarterly magazine to get these vintage prices and then saw the prices were much less than I had paid many years ago.

PuertoRicanFogBank

Just did an eBay "completed listings" search of mainly Topps cards from the seventies.

Boy, it appears that listing PSA-graded cards auction-style would not be in one's best interest. These sellers are taking a bath.

Perhaps the fixed-price, store approach does make more financial sense. Sad but true.

envoy98

<< <i>Is it me or does it seem like ebay has turned into a get rick quick idea. >>



Who's Rick and why are we after him?


Seriously though, I actually love the BIN, especially if I'm the first one to see it and the price is reasonable. I don't mind paying a couple dollars over what the last one sold for at auction if I can have it now. Personally, I wish guys like 4SC would utilize the BIN feature more. I can't tell you how many cards I've missed out on with an opening bid of 5.99 or $9.99 only to watch them go unsold because I forgot to go place my bid. Sure, I could place a bid early but that defeats the purpose in my mind. Plus, I'll watch them go unsold for $9.99 then I'll bid $12.99 on one and I'll lose it. Only to watch the next one go unsold at 9.99 again. Nature of the beast I suppose.

There are plenty of times that I wish a high starting bid was lower, but to be honest, some of those can be your best deals. it works out against the seller as opposed to for them. You can watch many, many auctions with high starting bids get less money than their low starting bid counterparts. I'll give you a recent example. I was looking for a PSA 9 Drew Pearson RC. Normally they sold in the $75-100 range. One was at auction and over $75, there was another, with an opening bid of $69.99. The first auction ended at $87 or $88. I ended up putting in a bid of $75 on the other one and won it for 69. Those high starting prices play mind games. I especially love watching auctions go for well over what another card is in a store for. 1971 Terry Bradshaw comes to mind. A few months ago there were 3 or 4 PSA 8's running. There were 2 in stores for BIN of $399 and $425. The others that were in auction went for $670 (it was gorgeous) and $450 and the other was in the 450 range as well. Neither of the other two in the stores sold and they were very comparable. <shrug>

ldferg

although the store concept seems to be a better option, i don't think some buyers look at the "store" results when searching. i've also noticed not every search will yield a store results.

f2tornado

Some items do better with BINs while others do better in auction style. Sometimes BINs are just hot while other times auctions are hot. Sometimes nothing seems to work. And sometimes a dud seller with the same card with higher shipping and a lousy scan gets a bigger bid. I don't understand it. I have discovered listing at 99 cents with a reasonable BIN will get some BIN hits and saves the listing fees. I gotten plenty of hits but also had some BIN killers get a bargain. All of this wouldn't be so bad if you wern't shelling out the larger listing fee to experiement at higher opening bids. The upshot is if sellers are not realizing full potential on cards then there are bargains to be found for the buyer. For every card I sell "too low" I probably have found a bargain to profit from. I guess in the grand scheme so long as I am collectively making enough profit for the time invested then I won't care if I "lose" on a couple of cards.

1966CUDA

I think David has a good point. I dont thinK putting stuff up in your ebay stores gets enough exposure. I dont think a lot of those items come up on a general search so they dont get seen.


-Claude

baseballfanatic

What is clogging up Ebay stores are the jerkwads that purchase items in an auction for 12.00 and when it arrives they rescan it and list it for 100.00 in their store...

RipublicaninMass

<< <i>What is clogging up Ebay stores are the jerkwads that purchase items in an auction for 12.00 and when it arrives they rescan it and list it for 100.00 in their store... >>



I have a more than a few people do that. Sadly, they actually sold them for 200 more than they paid

originalisbest

I really don't miss the prices you can possibly get stuck paying when "auction fever" hits - oftentimes I like BIN's and esp. make offer deals - hey, worst they can do is decline. Were I primarily a seller I'd certainly start my auctions at something I can live with, or offer it in a store format.

storm888

"And in all honesty I am glad for it, as I am tired of spending time and money to give away cards. "

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CDsNuts

Ebay is pretty upfront that these are your options:

- Store inventory- lower listing fees, less exposure in searches, higher final value fees
- Online auction- higher listing fees, higher exposure in searches, less time, lower final value fees

What's clogging up the searches is that it only costs 5 cents to list something in your store. Why would'nt a store list their entire $1+ inventory at 5 cents per listing? You never know what might sell, and you really have nothing to lose but the time it takes to list something and a nickel.

Some items should go to auction because there is a good chance for a bidding war. Examples:

- Any high grade vintage set
- Any pre-1979 PSA 10, pre-1972 PSA 9, or pre-1957 PSA 8
- Any low pop PSA 10 Robin Yount, Joe Montana, Mike Schmidt, Nolan Ryan, Kent Hrbek, etc......
- Any graded vintage unopened material

You get my drift. Anything there really isn't a huge market for, I generally list in my store and wait for the right guy to come along.

Lee

storm888

"What's clogging up the searches is that it only costs 5 cents to list something in your store."

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Store items never appear in regular search, UNLESS there are
fewer than 30 items matching the search listed in CORE (Auction/FP).

In January 2006, EBAY experimented with including store items
in the general search function. Sales soared for store owners. The
experiment ended in April 2006. By July, the store fee hikes were
ready to kick in, there was no store traffic, and thousands of stores
closed.

Ichiro51fan

<< <i>What is clogging up Ebay stores are the jerkwads that purchase items in an auction for 12.00 and when it arrives they rescan it and list it for 100.00 in their store... >>



I've only been actively selling on ebay for a bit over 1 month and haven't really noticed this. I suppose that if you had all day to sit around scanning auctions you could find some nice PSA's that were going for under or way under their SMR values, them turn around and try to re-sell them at a huge profit. I guess my question is, are poeple actually buying stuff at what seems to be to be ridiculously high BIN's? A lot of the research I've done shows stores with BIN's have jacked the prices way above both the SMR value and recent ended auction values. I guess I wonder why people would actually pay those kind of premiums.

Case in point... a while back, a 84 Donruss PSA 10 Mattingly rookie went for $505 (SMR of $525 I think). Since I have one to sell myself, I've been watching it closely for the last 2 months. The only one that has shown up since was in South Florida Sports Cards' store for $850. They now have listed it in an "auction" for $850 BIN. That's over 50% higher than both SMR and recent auctions. I just can't see anyone forking out that much extra, but someone must be doing it, cuz you see these tremendously high BIN's and store prices all over ebay. I suppose the high store values make a bit more sense cuz you don't have to pay the listing fees like with BIN's, but still! Part of me thinks I should list my Mattingly now so that people will compare it to the $850 BIN... maybe making it go higher than the SMR?

Anyway, it's definately a learning experience for me. My few auctions so far have been a mix of .99 cent opening bid stuff (usually for items I'm pretty sure will have a high demand), and relatively low opening bids of $2.99 to 9.99 for stuff I'm not sure about. Admittedly, it's a bit nerve racking. I've had a couple items barely sell at the break even point, which was ok with me considering they were relatively low demand PSA 8's. However, last night, my 84 Donruss PSA 10 Rickey Henderson came that close to going for a measly $36! Luckily, within the last 10 seconds, it jumped up to $56, which is only a couple of dollars less than the $60 SMR. I would been seriously disappointed if that thing had gone for only $36!

qmayer

<< <i>Why would'nt a store list their entire $1+ inventory at 5 cents per listing? >>



I did this last summer. Had about 2000-3000 $1-$50 cards from my heyday of collecting (which coincided with the overproduction years). I priced everything at 25-75% of book, depending on the player, condition, etc, and let it ride. Ended up selling probably about $4000 worth of cards, but I'm still stuck with the stuff that won't sell. I listed the rest on NAXCOM and get a bite once or twice a week.

Any ideas on how to get some decent money for the leftovers?

Justin

orutulsa

MANY sellers got tired of giving their items away for the opening bid. Thus, more and more BINs at higher prices.

Traffic is way down on EBAY, and the auction addicts have moved-on to other things. BINs and stores are the future of EBAY.


I think this perception is likely shared by many. But I wonder whether those who are active in non-sports or card-related categories are experiencing the same thing. The real question is whether there are categories/industries that still flourish in a true Ebay auction-style format. Anyone have any experience in other Ebay category arenas?

thedutymon

Good day,
See my note above aboui Non Sport, which I think is in even worse condition than you Sports guy's.
Neil

storm888

"Anyone have any experience in other Ebay category arenas?"

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I peddle merch in more than a dozen categories.

For the past year, everything has been date-comparatively
soft, except for used clothing. Prices in the category are
now declining - due to more players - but the sell-through
rates are still extremely high.

Common collectibles, continue their price declines across
categories.

Graphix

I'm sorry, I am sure I am just thick but what is the problem here? Are you saying you are mad because you are missing out on good deals and then having to pay more to a buyer who got the better deal and is reselling? Are you upset because with the BIN auctions you can't get good deals if the auctions happen to slip by other would be bidders? Are you stating that you are upset that the BIN auctions are causing the price of items to come down when you are selling them? I guess I am not reading it correctly.

CDsNuts

It's foolish to expect sellers to not act in their own best financial interest. "List it and let it go" is often not the most financially viable option.

The fact is that ebay has become less of an auction site and more of a virtual mall. Once you accept this and realize you may not be able to get as much of the stuff you like at flea market prices, it becomes much easier to swallow. Everybody likes a bargain, but it makes no sense to become frustrated because you can't find people who want to sell their stuff for way under fair market value. I can't find a bar that will give me free gin, but that won't stop me from getting my drink on.

Lee