[35mmfilmfan]

Am I just unlucky, or have others noticed this ? Many eBay listings have a 'Make An Offer' Option for the item - should it be something which I would like, but feel the suggested bid is mayhap a little high, I will usually make a offer by subtracting the postage charge from the suggested bid, thus hopefully getting free postage. When (or if) the seller responds, then negotiations can start, and hopefully I can obtain the item at a lower price, especially if it has been re-listed.

There are, however, some sellers who in my view abuse this. I collect books by a UK author, whose books are basically the talks he gave on wildlife in the forties and fifties, on the BBC Home Service. They are considered quite collectible, and are illustrated by Tunnicliffe, thus adding to their collectability and pushing up the price somewhat. This I accept, but the last three times I have put in an offer, to different sellers, it has been ignored, even when close to the asking price. The final straw was when I put in an offer close to the asking price on an item. No response, but when I checked later, the original asking price had doubled !

I contacted the seller to give my opinion of this :

'I am not impressed that the 'Buy It Now' price for this book has doubled in just a few hours. I know you can charge whatever the market will stand, but this is merely sharp practice - enticing potential buyers with a low price, then increasing it. Whatever other items you may have, rest assured I shall not be bidding on them.'

This is the response I received :

'Do you feel a little better after that little out burst?
The only ‘sharp practice’ about here is you missed buying a book for £12.00 that is worth at least £24.00 by being greedy and offering only £9.00! You obviously know this is a rarer volume and the only other copy being offered with a dust jacket at present is priced £38.00.
If I over price my stock, I am the only person who suffers because I don’t sell it!
Your ‘greedy’ offer actually alerted me to the fact that I hadn’t completed the advert, thank you! Oh, indeed, I have Blocked you from buying, so no worries there!
If there’s one thing that ‘gets my goat’ about England of 2023 it is those who believe they have the ‘right’ of ENTITLEMENT to do and say what they wish. Get over yourself! Come the Comet, we’re all dust!'

My reply was this :

'If you think that was an 'outburst' you have indeed had a sheltered upbringing, my dear. It is not sharp practice to buy items at an affordable price, neither is it unacceptable to state clearly and politely one's point of view. Your activity has done nothing to improve my view of non-commercial eBay sellers. Thank you for blocking me - it saves me the trouble.'

I am at a loss to understand how the seller can have a 99.5% feedback rating with that kind of attitude - or am I being unreasonable ?




.

[luftfluss]

I sell much more than buy on eBay, but I don't think I've ever encountered this scenario.

If I do find what I consider to be a particularly good deal, I don't dillydally - I hit Buy It Now and check out.

[Just1MoreDave]

The feedback is only for completed transactions. They may not complete many.

I just move on. For every seller with two pages of disclaimers and policies and I ONLY SHIP ON TEUSDAY PLEASE PAY IMEDIATLY, there's another who is better. No matter how awesome the item is, another will come along next week.

[Lord Lucan]

This is the response I received [from an Ebay seller]: "The only ‘sharp practice’ about here is you missed buying a book for £12.00 that is worth at least £24.00"

My reaction to that, based on my fairly extensive Ebay experience, is that there are no standard prices that things sell for on Ebay. I see the same stuff selling at prices which are a factor of 10, 20 or even 50 apart from each other. Asking prices can be even wilder, even if you exclude the obvious errors like forgetting the decimal point.

I never invite offers when I sell, but I get them anyway. My auction starting price or BiN price is already the least I will accept and when I decline a low ball I politely say that is why. Sometimes when auctioning I get an early offer a bit higher than my start price and I tell them simply to bid it instead - usually they don't though.

I often get offers from sellers for an amount below their start or BiN price, as a result of my looking at their page. As it happens I have never accepted one, but when I decline I say why: for example for a flashgun that lacked its battery holder, which their advert had not pointed out. It's possible a seller is a deceased owner's relative and is unaware of things like missing battery holders.

[To the seller] "Your activity has done nothing to improve my view of non-commercial eBay sellers."

As this seller mentioned his "stock" it sounds like he is a commercial seller. I actually avoid sellers who say they are dealers, even though they say it up front like it is a plus point. The best people to buy from IMHO are the private ones like the relatives of a deceased. They are often anxious to please and can be grateful of finding an appreciative home for things they did not want to dump or go in a house clearance. They often do not know the true value of what they sell (which can cut either way) and I have felt guilty for winning things for 99 pence (Ebay default auction start price) that might have fetched £50-£100 another day. I have almost contacted them to offer another £10 afterwards.

Most "dealers" are actually guys playing the market from their back room as a paying hobby. They take losing out like a bad Monolpoly player would, and are quick and expert with insults. Many do not even seem to know anything about what they are selling, and they are inclined to use immaculate stock photos rather than ones of what they are actually selling. They are a world away from what I would describe as a proper dealer - such as Ffordes Photoraphic in Scotland who have been around for decades (in Essex originally). I don't know, perhaps someone can tell me, is there a special "Dealer" status on Ebay because some of them (like Ffordes) have the same stuff, even small stuff, listed for months until it sells, where I OTOH incur a significant fee after (I think) five auction re-listings. I found that out the hard way.

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Last edited by Lord Lucan; 02-10-2023 at 02:36 AM. Reason: Minor clarification

[gatorguy]

I sell much more than buy on eBay, but I don't think I've ever encountered this scenario.

If I do find what I consider to be a particularly good deal, I don't dillydally - I hit Buy It Now and check out.

I've learned to do the same. Great deals don't stick around as a rule.

[Dartmoor Dave]

I sell antiquarian books online on behalf of a charity (not via ebay) and that dealer has demonstrated multiple flaws in his thinking in just one sentence:

The only ‘sharp practice’ about here is you missed buying a book for £12.00 that is worth at least £24.00 by being greedy and offering only £9.00! You obviously know this is a rarer volume and the only other copy being offered with a dust jacket at present is priced £38.00.

Firstly, that dealer needs to understand that the book isn't "worth at least £24.00". An antiquarian or collectable book has got no intrinsic material value at all; it's worth what a collector is willing to pay for it and not one penny more. If you're the only person looking to buy that book at the moment, and £9 is what you're willing to pay, then that's what it's worth. The fact that someone else has got a copy for sale at £38.00 is irrelevant as a way of establishing the correct market value. The only way to establish the actual market value is to find out what the book has been sold for recently.

Secondly, the dealer has made the mistake of thinking that rare means valuable. It doesn't. I regularly handle rare books that have almost no value at all, even though they are so rare that there might only be one other copy for sale anywhere in the world. They are rare simply because there was only ever one small print run and very few people have bothered to preserve a copy over the past hundred years or so, and that doesn't make them valuable. The only thing that would make them valuable would be if there were enough eager collectors out there willing to fight over them.

When I first started selling books for my charity I worked alongside an older guy who handled collectable vinyl records for them, and he had a very strange attitude towards value. He would decide what he thought a record was worth, and once he made that decision he was unshakeable. In his mind, to sell it for one penny less than he thought it was worth would mean we had lost money, so he ended up losing the charity thousands of pounds a year in overpriced stock that never sold at all.

Me, I price to sell and I'm always willing to negotiate with a buyer.

Sadly there are some very cranky old book dealers still out there, although thankfully they are dying out one by one, and it looks like you've run into one of those. That trick of doubling the price on you was outrageous!

[35mmfilmfan]

I sell antiquarian books online on behalf of a charity (not via ebay) and that dealer has demonstrated multiple flaws in his thinking in just one sentence:




Firstly, that dealer needs to understand that the book isn't "worth at least £24.00". An antiquarian or collectable book has got no intrinsic material value at all; it's worth what a collector is willing to pay for it and not one penny more. If you're the only person looking to buy that book at the moment, and £9 is what you're willing to pay, then that's what it's worth. The fact that someone else has got a copy for sale at £38.00 is irrelevant as a way of establishing the correct market value. The only way to establish the actual market value is to find out what the book has been sold for recently.

Secondly, the dealer has made the mistake of thinking that rare means valuable. It doesn't. I regularly handle rare books that have almost no value at all, even though they are so rare that there might only be one other copy for sale anywhere in the world. They are rare simply because there was only ever one small print run and very few people have bothered to preserve a copy over the past hundred years or so, and that doesn't make them valuable. The only thing that would make them valuable would be if there were enough eager collectors out there willing to fight over them.

When I first started selling books for my charity I worked alongside an older guy who handled collectable vinyl records for them, and he had a very strange attitude towards value. He would decide what he thought a record was worth, and once he made that decision he was unshakeable. In his mind, to sell it for one penny less than he thought it was worth would mean we had lost money, so he ended up losing the charity thousands of pounds a year in overpriced stock that never sold at all.

Me, I price to sell and I'm always willing to negotiate with a buyer.

Sadly there are some very cranky old book dealers still out there, although thankfully they are dying out one by one, and it looks like you've run into one of those. That trick of doubling the price on you was outrageous!

@Dartmoor Dave - thank you, I'm glad it's not just me.

[Just1MoreDave]

The seller may also have had some emotional attachment to the item, so they didn't really want to sell. If they can blame you for being cheap, they don't have to face the real reason. When my wife was clearing out her family home, many items had little monetary or useful value and had sat undisturbed for decades. But when it was time to throw them away, she couldn't.

[carlb]

I sell antiquarian books online on behalf of a charity (not via ebay) and that dealer has demonstrated multiple flaws in his thinking in just one sentence:




Firstly, that dealer needs to understand that the book isn't "worth at least £24.00". An antiquarian or collectable book has got no intrinsic material value at all; it's worth what a collector is willing to pay for it and not one penny more. If you're the only person looking to buy that book at the moment, and £9 is what you're willing to pay, then that's what it's worth. The fact that someone else has got a copy for sale at £38.00 is irrelevant as a way of establishing the correct market value. The only way to establish the actual market value is to find out what the book has been sold for recently.

Secondly, the dealer has made the mistake of thinking that rare means valuable. It doesn't. I regularly handle rare books that have almost no value at all, even though they are so rare that there might only be one other copy for sale anywhere in the world. They are rare simply because there was only ever one small print run and very few people have bothered to preserve a copy over the past hundred years or so, and that doesn't make them valuable. The only thing that would make them valuable would be if there were enough eager collectors out there willing to fight over them.

When I first started selling books for my charity I worked alongside an older guy who handled collectable vinyl records for them, and he had a very strange attitude towards value. He would decide what he thought a record was worth, and once he made that decision he was unshakeable. In his mind, to sell it for one penny less than he thought it was worth would mean we had lost money, so he ended up losing the charity thousands of pounds a year in overpriced stock that never sold at all.

Me, I price to sell and I'm always willing to negotiate with a buyer.

Sadly there are some very cranky old book dealers still out there, although thankfully they are dying out one by one, and it looks like you've run into one of those. That trick of doubling the price on you was outrageous!

Great post and spot on. There's often a very wide gap between what a seller thinks something is worth and what a buyer thinks it's worth.

[35mmfilmfan]

Great post and spot on. There's often a very wide gap between what a seller thinks something is worth and what a buyer thinks it's worth.

Certainly was in my case ! Still available, same price - no interest !

[35mmfilmfan]

<snip>

When I first started selling books for my charity I worked alongside an older guy who handled collectable vinyl records for them, and he had a very strange attitude towards value. He would decide what he thought a record was worth, and once he made that decision he was unshakeable. In his mind, to sell it for one penny less than he thought it was worth would mean we had lost money, so he ended up losing the charity thousands of pounds a year in overpriced stock that never sold at all.

<snip>

I've met this too, with Vinyl and GB stamps. The charity looks up the value of items in a catalogue (Rare Record Guide or Gibbons), and without taking any notice of either the quality or condition of the item, or (in the case of vinyl, if it is a first pressing or a later one) assumes that the price quoted is the actual value. DSOTM is a classic case - the original pressing is rare and expensive, later pressings less so, but shops still expect to get the highest price. OK, they are attempting to make money for the charity, and some (like Oxfam) do actually understand the position, but not all. That said, should I find something that I want which is under priced (in my view), I will ask to see the manager, explain the situation and offer what I consider to be a reasonable price. Amazingly, I have had this offer rejected, and had to pay the lower price when the manager (or manageress - happened with either gender) has taken instructions too literally and told me they are not allowed to accept offers. Luckily, most of these shops have a donations box, so the balance goes in there.

Tony

[Dartmoor Dave]

I've met this too, with Vinyl and GB stamps. The charity looks up the value of items in a catalogue (Rare Record Guide or Gibbons), and without taking any notice of either the quality of the item, or (in the case of vinyl, if it is a first pressing or a later one) assumes that the price quoted is the actual value. DSOTM is a classic case - the original pressing is rare and expensive, later pressings less so, but shops still expect to get the highest price. OK, they are attempting to make money for the charity, and some (like Oxfam) do actually understand the position, but not all. That said, should I find something that I want which is under priced (in my view), I will ask to see the manager, explain the situation and offer what I consider to be a reasonable price. Amazingly, I have had this offer rejected, and had to pay the lower price when the manager (or manageress - happened with either gender) has taken instructions too literally and told me they are not allowed to accept offers. Luckily, most of these shops have a donations box, so the balance goes in there.

Tony

Please let me say thank you for being one of those very rare people who truly understands what charity shops are actually trying to do.

Most charities who sell things online have got a huge number of shops around the country all trying to do their best with the very limited resources they've got, and of course you'll get enormous variations in the quality of the online offerings from different locations. When I look at online listings for camera gear from most charities I'm often horrified: lenses listed with no mention of which mount they fit, photos showing obvious fungus or other problems, cameras listed as untested but priced at the top of the market. I'm lucky that the guy who handles cameras for my charity in my area is a retired pro who really knows what he's doing, but other towns and other charities aren't so fortunate and you'll often see listings so hopeless that you'll want to weep at the sight of them.

Ah well, I'm going off thread here so I'll shut up. I think I was trying to say that when it comes to charity shops -- as opposed to ebay sellers -- we tree huggin' hippy types really are trying our best to give you the best deal that we can. But most of us just are well-meaning amateurs who get it wrong a lot of the time despite our best efforts.