Questions For Members That Sell On EBAY

[raulus]

Originally Posted by SPMIDD

I use EBAY mostly to support my card habit and I like to win auctions but sometimes, I like to use the ‘make best offer’ route. With that said, do sellers that have cards priced way over the average price of recent past sales expect to sell at the higher price? For instance, there is a ’56 Mantle SGC 3 on EBAY and the seller is asking $2400 but the recent past sales indicate that the auctions for a SGC 3 Mantle are going for $1100 to $1200. If I were to offer say $1200 to $1300 for the card, would that insult the seller? To be quite honest, I normally don’t even bother to look at cards that have an asking price that is grossly overpriced, but I really like this card. My questions are based on past experiences where I make a good offer and my offer is automatically rejected and that frustrates me.

If you're talking about common issues in low grades, then my advice is to just move on. You'll find a similar item for the right price soon enough. If someone wants to hold out for 200% of the market for an item that sells 10x per day at the market price, then that's their right to be patient until some sucker comes along. And it's your right to not be that sucker.

If you're talking about rare items, then that's a whole different scenario, because your only reasonable options are:

1) Pay the man. Or negotiate for a deal that you can live with, which probably includes paying more than you might want to pay.

2) Wait patiently for it to come up for sale somewhere else, and hope it's less expensive if/when it ever does come up. Just realize you could be waiting for years or decades, and when it does come up, it might be just as expensive or even more expensive.

OR

3) Decide you never really wanted the item anyway, and move on to something else.

[Jim65]

If sellers are insulted by lowball offers, its their own fault for not using auto-decline,

[SPMIDD]

Good morning everyone,
I appreciate the opinions and information. There is some good insight on the board and that is why I posted these questions. I think I will just wait and win an auction or find one more closely priced to recent sales. Anyway, thanks for the replies.

Scott

[Kutcher55]

Never be afraid to do a much lower offer. Most sellers have auto decline on if the offer is below a certain threshold. That’s what I do anyway. The other thing you can do (and apologies if this was already mentioned) is to send a note to the seller about the card. This can be done for bin cards that don’t accept offers. In my experiences they either ignore you or just as often they will come back and offer you something in the middle and on occasion they might even take your written offer. Check their feedback before approaching them though.