Profit margins

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Posted By: Corey R. Shanus

Some people seem to operate under a selling philosophy akin to throwing as much mud as possible at someone in the hope that some of it will stick. As applied to selling rare items where it takes a fair degree of knowledge and expertise to know a reasonable price, the strategy is to pick some stupid number in the hope someone will counter at a much much lower price (perhaps even offered as a polite way of rejecting the initial offer). Then lo and behold the seller will accept the "counteroffer". I actually did this one time many years ago when I offered to sell something to a dealer. The dealer, it seems, had recently rigged an auction which resulted in a card selling for literally 10-15 times (it sold for $33k) what people thought it was reasonably worth. About a month after that rigged auction I had a rare card I wanted to sell. I thought it had a retail value of $4k. I offered it to the same dealer for $25k, arguing that it had to be worth around that given his $33k sale of a month ago. He of course knew the auction was a sham and therefore could not pay me anything close to my asking price. However, not wanting to lose face and therefore giving some BS reason how my card differed from the one he auctioned, he said the best he could do was offer me $7k-$8K. He obviously felt there was no way I would go down from $25k to $7k-$8k. So you can guess what I did. Without hesitating I told him I would take the $8k and I would ship the card to him that day. I then quickly got off the phone, not wanting to give him a chance to rescind his offer.