what is going on?

[AmiNeo]

What I hate about Ebay is that it has ruined my hobby for collecting games/consoles/computers. They drive the prices so high and flea markets, garage sales and gaming stores have taken notice and have followed suit. There have been several cases where I go into one of these places and see all these high prices and when I question them on it their response is always "They go for that on Ebay all day long." Ok, well you are not Ebay and people generally go to Flea Markets and Garage Sales for items at low prices, not premium prices. It's all BS.

I also hate when people justify the inflated price by stating that the item is RARE. You know, I understand that you don't just find Atari Jaguar's or Amiga 1200s at every flea market, garage sale, or gaming store in the US, but I would have to say that they are common enough on Ebay to not be considered RARE. (And I have seen several auctions on Ebay stating these items as RARE as well even though I see them being sold there daily)

And one last complaint. The charges. I understand that they need to make money to stay in business but I listed an item for $10 Buy It Now once and no one bought it and I had to pay $1.50 to list it. So I relisted the item for an additional $1.50 and no one bought it again. Relisted it one more time and someone finally bought it but by that point I had already paid Ebay $4.50 in fees. Why can't they just do a one time listing fee? That was the first and last time I sold on Ebay. It's not worth it unless you are selling an item that is guaranteed to sell the first time or an item priced at hundreds of dollars. Who knows, maybe I messed up and there is a way to relist without the additional fees. Either way I felt ripped off.

Yea these 'shops' also forget that the expected fees are also included by the seller in the price of the item so it isn't a true valuation of the item for sales worth. The money the seller gets in their hands is probably about 80% of what it sells for, all fees paid.

---------- Post added at 19:21 ---------- Previous post was at 19:13 ----------

I think Evilbay also refund your listing fee if it happens to sell the second time. I dont use them a heck of a lot for selling, just when needed a bit of extra funds ( and I prob will even less now that Im here ) but you may want to check that out

---------- Post added at 19:25 ---------- Previous post was at 19:21 ----------

When buying for my collection, i try to keep an eye out for items that end in the early hours of the morning and put a bid on in the last few seconds... there are usually less people on at 3am to out bid you

 

[Harrison]

From a seller's perspective I hate ebay as their whole system is geared towards the buyer now. You can't leave a buyer negative feedback any more, which is just mad... and the whole dispute process is completely bias towards the buyer, with ebay more interested in reversing payments and offering refunds that listening to the sellers side.

However this does make the reverse more appealing as buyers know they have a good system on their side if something goes wrong. As a buyer I launched a dispute recently when a seller sold me an electric wing mirror, stating in the auction that is was second hand but fully working, but on arrival the motor wasn't working, and the seller initially offered a full refund, but then disappeared and refused to answer any further comms. Ebay reversed the money for me and gave a full refund without issue. So as a buyer it has its plus points, but as a seller I don't like it for the unbalanced site rules and dispute process.

 

[Cloudane]

Interesting thread (if a lil risky to post in). Certainly glad I found AmiBay for many of the reasons stated

evilbay is a strange beast.

Some of the traders on there are doing a decent service.. you want a particular part quickly and at a fairly reasonable price (inflated at a justifiable amount for their work and storage etc), and there are a few around who do that without taking the weewee too much. There's one guy I keep seeing a lot of - I won't name drop.. er, username sounds fresh and breezy - who I have bought a few bits off for this exact reason. Here it might take more time waiting (or posting a wanted and waiting) for whatever part to come along.

(Maybe you can get anything quickly here, I've not hung around long enough to see, but that would be my impression of message based buy/sell sites normally, an impression that goes wayyyy back to CIX auctions. Much greater fairness, sometimes at a cost of speed)

A bit like a commercial "kit" site really, but with much less quality testing and therefore lower prices...all depends on what tradeoffs you're willing to make.

OTOH there are others who mark every little thing sky high BIN and have an automatic reflex of adding "RARE", and most people are sensible enough not to touch them with a barge pole. I've seen one or two on there recently also selling 2.5" drives (generic beasties) for exuberant prices because they happened to mention "Amiga compatible" in the title and thought of cashing in on it. Yet anyone who knows could actually get a brand new drive for *cheaper* and, although way over 4GB these days, just partition it to 4GB (or use one of the upgrades/hacks that allows larger drives or whatever). Or of course CF-IDE.

As ever, it's a matter of "buyer beware" on there.. always know what you're buying in proper detail.

Seller beware too. I can't wait for the day that I find "Amibays" for every subject so as never to have to use that site again. The fees, when you add in the Paypal fees (if you accept credit cards which you pretty much have to) are just insane. And of course, they seem to have this horrible monopoly situation going on and force people to use Paypal which they own.. eep. If they were called Microsoft they'd have had their arses handed to them ages ago for this kind of behaviour.

Anyway a last comment on buying... one interesting thing I've noticed a lot from observation is that although something may have a BIN price of "X" and be relisted month after month and never sell, often another user will start the same item in the same general condition as a min-price no reserve auction and because of the adrenaline driven sniping and counter-sniping frenzy at the end, end up selling it for "X+10". Conversely, I think this is how people are making up their BIN prices. Heck in other sections of the site selling current modern day items, I've often seen this happen way past retail prices, which is just silly but just shows how people forget their heads in that last minute bid war.

Of course, we're all sensible and cool headed on here I have to agree it's a much fairer system than all the game playing that goes on on evilbay.

 

[Slayer]

Just thinking about all this right now and I've developed an entirely different opinion...

The only reason you people think things should be worth a lousy penny is because of there age, am I right?

I remember buying 32 megs of memory in the early nineties and paying a cool $3200.00... now you can get a 2 gig stick for $85.00 or less...

I remember paying $6000.00 for an 060 board etc...

I brought alot of games in the $80.00 to $120.00 range

Now... these prices you think are so outrageous really aren't that much different from what they were worth brand new in the day...

So why the insulted stances? I used to be the type of person who would plead with distributors to post my stuff the exact moment I wanted it and bride them with double postage or worse...

Money talks and why shouldn't it... who the hell cares who pays what and who rips off who etc... life is a maze of situations and outcomes... Mankind muddles in just about everything possible and generally things would be alot better if there wasn't so much muddling...

e.g. If the stupid were allowed to die then the human race would actually evolve into superior beings...

Think about it, God wants us to care but even God has common sense and reason... although that's an assumption on my part...

 

[cheeba]

It's not the prices that bother me as such, more the method by which they've become what they are.

As has been mentioned in this thread before, it only takes a cursory glance around the listings to see that most of the big prices are being driven by a tiny handful of sellers. You know the guys, they'll have a vast amount of 'big ticket' rare games on the go at any one time, often for about twice what even collectors would typically pay for it elsewhere.

I understand the value rare items can have, but there's also an emerging trend of common-as-dirt stuff being price driven because it's well regarded/popular/well reviewed. Stuff that sold in the hundreds of thousands which the big sellers are drip-feeding into the system, being sure never to have too many around at once. Not that's crappy, as it's cutting out a lot of the more casual people who could really enjoy these great games.

And this handful of sellers - as their items are constantly being relisted, they're being used more and more as the reference point for other sellers unsure what to charge for their stuff. And anyone who sells for reasonable money gets snapped up by these guys and put back into the system. And so the market thins until you've got a dozen or so sellers selling to a couple dozen or so hardcore collectors. Which is alienating all but the most die-hard, and bad for the scene as a whole.

This is more from the perspective of a C64 fan, it may not be so bad elsewhere. But it's certainly a lot worse than it was.

 

[Merlin]

@ Slayer

The difference is that on AmiBay, common sense prevails. Most items depreciate with age, so that's kind of an accepted fact.

If someone puts an item on here with a LOLPrice and a OMFGRare and a Billy Mays -type description, then it will pretty much get read and ignored, as items shouldn't need that amount of pimping to shift them.

Items sell on here for what the buyer is prepared to pay and the seller is prepared to accept; that's it in a nutshell. No pimping, shilling, pulling of heart strings, guns to heads etc.

So, what's wrong with that in your eyes?