Buy it Nows....still popular?

[Archive]

Posted By: Brian McQueen

I never especially cared for BINS, especially after I started selling cards on the forum. If I was looking for a set price, I'd just throw the card in BST.

On Ebay, BINS are so easily "sprung" they're not even worth placing on the auction without a large reserve. A single bid wipes out your BIN which makes it totally pointless in most cases. So in order to protect your BIN, you have to stick a large reserve on your card. I don't know what it is about using reserves, but I'm less motivated to bid on cards that have these. I don't know why. But I've had several collectors agree with me that they are somewhat of a deterent.

So, knowing I may be scaring away buyers that are considering bidding on my item by placing a reserve on the card, I usually just do away with both the BIN and the reserve and let the Ebay community decide how much my card is worth. My cards tend to go cheap for some reason so I think the lesson I've learned here is use the BST pages whenever possible. The BST pages vs. Ebay is an entirely different thread topic altogether, so I think I'll just stop there.