Decline in eBay listings?

[t206blogcom]

It's a shame too because many collectors aren't aware of the auction houses and soley rely on ebay. When I started putting together my T206 set, I only knew about ebay. Halfway through I stumbled upon Net54 and auction houses. I then realized I overpaid for most of my set.

[pgellis]

There are several issues that have hurt eBay in recent years.

1. BINs - When I started to put together my T206 set about 10 years ago, there were at least a couple hundred eBay AUCTIONS for graded T206s ending every week on Sundays. Now, you get maybe 10-20 AUCTIONS ending each week. Everything is an over-priced BIN that just keeps getting listed month after month after month.

2. FEES - It seems that whenever a rare piece (card or memorabilia) is listed on eBay, someone reaches out and contacts the seller in order to hammer out a deal outside of eBay. It has happened to me with leather football helmets so many times I can't remember them all. I once told a seller to let his auction run it's course and I guaranteed him that I would be the high bidder. He let it run 7 days and then pulled it off of eBay within only hours of it's ending. Sellers would rather cut a lesser deal off of eBay to save on the seller's fees. I wish eBay made it harder to pull an item from an active listing once there was an initial bid by a bidder.

3. SHILLING - Once eBay hid bidder's IDs, it made it harder to prove shilling. Once a bidder suspects shilling, they will usually stop bidding on an item and if it becomes a pattern, they begin to ignore a certain seller altogether. Now, there was always shilling from the beginning of eBay, but now they make it so easy to do without any recourse.

I think eBay should go back to 100% auctions. You can have a BIN also, but the item must be an auction to begin with. In other words, you can have a card with a BIN of $500, but it must be listed as an auction with a starting price less than $500, for example. Don't allow sellers to end an auction once a bid has been placed and let's see member ID's again.

[Joshchisox08]

Originally Posted by t206blogcom

It's a shame too because many collectors aren't aware of the auction houses and soley rely on ebay. When I started putting together my T206 set, I only knew about ebay. Halfway through I stumbled upon Net54 and auction houses. I then realized I overpaid for most of my set.

I agree with that Jason. There's only a couple of auctions that I'm aware of that regularly has t206's.

Sterling and Joe's vintage. Other than that I don't know about any but eBay. Which like you said are almost always overpriced.