Ebay Is So Boring These Days.

My experience with Best Offers is that you get offers of 50% of your ask. Most best offers are for much lower than I could buy the coin for. Its just not worth my time to engage these people as they either don't know how to value the coin or are just looking for a steal.

You can get uneven results at auction, so BIN is a way to make your 10-15% without risking losing 20% on a coin. Turning inventory quickly has no value if you are losing money on every transaction.

^ Agree with the "depends what you are buying". I like hunting foreign Dansco type albums so it gets me excited when one actually comes along. :D

Andreww99, there is also the issue of sellers listing artificially inflated BIN prices, or just not being in tune with current market conditions. This can truly result in a coin value 50% of the buy it now price, and thus the offers are not necessarily out of line.

Of course offering $200 for a $300 coin is ridiculous but offering $200 for a $225 coin listed at $400 is not.

2 comments about ebay and auctions

1) ebay has turned from an avenue where joe nobody could sell his items to the world, and get a fair price (below retail, to a place (as mentioned above) where dealers are trolling the site using it for an added revenue stream.

People (myself included) who used ebay to buy and sell 10+ years ago were looking for deals we were not looking go to the local store and buy something off the shelve at store pricing.

2) in ALL retail, any communication with a consumer is an opportunity. you might receive an offer for 50% of what your price is, but is your price below trends already, or at or above. regardless you now have the opportunity to negotiate.

As a buyer I love the 99 cent auctions, so many good deals

As a seller, 99 cent auctions are the worst in most cases, it might drive some eyeballs to your listings, but for most auctions it is a very fast way to lose money on every sale. I followed Pacific's advice about a year ago, stopped with auctions and went to BIN with best offer, it worked pretty well in most cases. I now use a mix of BIN with best offer and auctions where I set the start price at a level that I am comfortable selling it for. I do sell fewer coins, but at least they return a small profit (assuming I did not overpay), it just takes longer to sell, but this is a hobby not a business so I am not too concerned with volume, more with break even. Common and low demand coins typically sit at BIN, while higher demand coins (eg. vicky 50 cents) will go for an auction.

The auction format I hate the most is reserve prices, only because far too often the ebay bids never approach the reserve price. It is very frustrating to watch a coin you would like to buy go unsold when you are the highest bidder are willing to pay more and the bids do not go high enough. Then have the seller not respond when you ask if you can pay more for the coin.

I have been both a buyer and seller in these circumstances so have seen both sides. If you are listing a coin at somewhere near fair value then ignoring lowball offers makes sense. And no need to get into an philosophical arguments with buyers.

However many, many sellers will list coins for far above market price resulting in what appears to be lowball offers. This happens often when markets move lower and a seller is using wishful thinking when listing a coin. Or worse is using PCGS or other similar price guides with prices so far out of line with reality it is sometimes laughable. Does bump up some bidding wars though.

Worst is listing with "Best Offer accepted" and not actually planning on accepting the best offer.

One more note - as in the stock market, the amount a seller paid for a coin is completely irrelevant to the coin's value. If I buy a stock at $100 and the market price is $50, I'm not going to go far by listing it at $100.

Simple logic. If my offer is the best offer and is not accepted, obviously the seller is not accepting the best offer.

But what I really meant was that if the seller is only accepting a 2-3% discount between the buy it now price and a counteroffer, when the original coin was 50% overpriced, does not really indicate that there is much room for negotiation.

Buy it now or best offer means there is a set price but is willing to accept your offers, NOT all offers.
So if your best offer is unacceptable then the seller doesn't have to sell it to you because that is all you are prepared to pay.
The Seller sets the price NOT the buyer.