[raulus]

Some interesting takes on here, particularly for people who have been willing to express an opinion regarding ratios and percentages. I'll share a sale from just 2 days ago on eBay, and the negotiation that occurred.

I had a nice little PSA-graded Mays exhibit for sale, not real common for the grade, with a couple of recent sales on eBay at that grade. One recent sale at $360, and another at $357. Knowing that everyone loves to play the game and feel like they got a deal by talking me down, I priced it slightly above this level at $390, and included the possibility to make offers. Can't remember where I set the automatic rejection level, but it was probably around $330 or $340. I figure anything below that, it's not worth even trying to counter.

Couple of days ago, I received an offer at $350. It looks like his first few offers were autorejected, as he had just 2 offers left. For those of you doing the math at home, this is a 10.25% discount off of the asking price. So for some who expect a bigger discount when making offers, I suppose this would have been aggravating.

Knowing that he and I probably weren't far apart, but wanting to get right up to where the last few sales had occurred, I countered within about 30 mins at $360.

He accepted, and I shipped it off to him yesterday. If he had countered at $355, would I have accepted? Probably? I guess we'll never know, since he didn't try. I suspect he decided that $5 wasn't enough to bother arguing about, although other buyers have certainly haggled with me back and forth with offers over such small pricing differences in the past.

In many ways, the whole thing seemed a lot less exciting than most of the comments on this thread. But maybe it's because my asking price wasn't much more than comps, and I was happy to come down to comps, whereas the buyer was happy to come up to comps after probing me at a little below comps, and in spite of a couple of autorejections.

In the end, no one got banned, and I was happy with the sale. With any luck, the buyer will be happy with his purchase, at least once it gets there after going through the authentication process.