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Post by Farrar on Apr 27, 2015 9:07:41 GMT -5
When I eventually realized that no matter how high I set my max bid I would inevitably still get "sniped" at the last millisecond, I set a couple of max bids as insanely high, LOL. I figured, if someone wants it that badly, let 'em pay for it (yes, I concede I may have been playing right into the seller's hands).
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Post by DE Sinclair on Apr 27, 2015 15:08:46 GMT -5
I haven't gotten any comics off Ebay for a while, but I use it fairly often for toys. It's especially handy for the "build-a-figure" (BAF) characters because you can avoid buying figures you don't want just to get the leg, or head, or whatever you need to complete the BAF figure you want. Or vice versa, if you want the figure, but don't care about the BAF part. It's also good for short-packed figures, like females that only come one in a box. You get charged a premium for them sometimes, but some of them are impossible to find in stores. I don't have the time or patience for sniping, so I just set low-ball bids and sometimes I get it, and sometimes I don't. If I don't get it, I keep trying until I land it at the price I want. It can take a while sometimes, but none of these things are necessities, so I can wait.
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Post by Phil Maurice on Apr 27, 2015 17:55:47 GMT -5
When I eventually realized that no matter how high I set my max bid I would inevitably still get "sniped" at the last millisecond, I set a couple of max bids as insanely high, LOL. I figured, if someone wants it that badly, let 'em pay for it (yes, I concede I may have been playing right into the seller's hands). I've won over a hundred auctions using the advice of many here: bid your max and hope for the best. I also have a story about over-bidding.
If you're like me, you remember exactly where you were and what you were doing on August 14, 2012, the night Ron Palillo died. As a big fan of "Welcome Back, Kotter" and Palillo's beloved Horshack character, I was understandably shaken. Late that night, after several cocktails and viewing a few reruns of the program, I took to ebay and bid a hefty amount for a full set of Mattel's Kotter action figures mint on the card. And won. Handily.
The next morning, suffering from a blinding headache and buyer's remorse, I consoled myself with the thought that I would simply turn them around to the biggest Kotter fan on the web. Turns out that person is me. Nearly 3 years later, it is still the highest price ever paid for these items.
tl;dr: Do not drink and bid.
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Post by marvelmaniac on Apr 27, 2015 18:47:51 GMT -5
I used to snipe all the time but only on auctions when I knew I would be home(usually weekends).
I am never home on weekends anymore so if I do bid now on an auction I just put in my max that I am willing to pay and when I get home I check Monday morning to see if I won.
I just recently lost 2 auctions(Rawhide Kid #1 and #15) because I was NOT home to snipe so the winning bidder just kept chipping away at my bid until he just got over my max.
If I was home to snipe on those auctions my max would not have been put in and there is no way the winner would have known I was going to bid.
As already stated it does not matter when you bid you just have to be the highest bidder.
Some auctions like Comic Connect do not allow sniping, any bids placed in the last minutes(do not remember the exact amount of time) of the auction will prolong the end of the auction by 5 minutes.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 27, 2015 19:03:18 GMT -5
I hate finding out something sold super cheap after the auction had ended. I used to search for Johnny Ryan Angry Youth Comix every single day. Nothing from the self publish days ever came up. Then I got busy and stopped. Next thing you know, someone on some message board posts that they just bought THE FIRST issue for $20, he was the only bidder. I don't know how low the print run was, but the later issues after he had become famous were typically 200-300. So I'm imagining somewhere between 50-100. What luck for that guy, but I'd have bid it up to $100 if I had known. Same thing happened with the first volume of Elflord. I decided to check completed listings, and saw that I missed FOUR issues that sold for a total of just under $20. I'd have gladly paid $150 for that lot, and only that low because one of those issues I already had. It's the only issue I have, I paid $50 for it, and I had searched about five years for the opportunity to buy it at that price. My stomach dropped when I saw I missed my chance at that lot. Two of those issues are still available right now, for about $500 total  Oh well, can't dwell on it, right? Just gotta keep looking, because the demand seems to be lower than I thought if a lot of four could sell that cheap. Sooner or later I'll get my chance. And, like I said in my first post, that high bid is without you bidding. The SECOND high bid might have been 19$, but the guy that won might have put a max bid of $1000. So just 'cause one guy got a deal on that auction doesn't mean that you would. Yeah, but since I'm willing to pay higher than going rate, I'm betting the odds are decent I'd win an auction for a comic I had searched for years for even the chance to bid on one. I usually have a pretty good idea of what it takes to score a self published 80's comic. The auctions I typically lose are for Bronze Age mags, where they are nowhere near as scarce so I'm trying to win an auction for less than going rate because I know another copy will be up for auction tomorrow anyway. If it's a comic that might not come to auction for four years, I'll give it all I had. I once emptied my bank account and offered every cent to my name for a particular comic, no negotiation. It worked out though, sold for 1400% profit later. Although I have no desire to own a comic that valuable, it was the jewel of my collection and completely irreplaceable, so I wasn't about to sell it for less. |
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Post by Farrar on Apr 27, 2015 21:21:19 GMT -5
I've won over a hundred auctions using the advice of many here: bid your max and hope for the best. In the beginning I actually did win a few auctions (nowhere near your total though), and this lulled me into a false sense of security. Maybe I won the first few auctions I entered because I was bidding on individual items/magazines. Then I started bidding on bundled items: several old magazines for reasonable prices--bargains, and I was willing to go higher, much higher. But these were the ones I started losing consistently, no matter how insanely high I set my max bid. I suppose I could bid on the occasional indovidual item here or there, but the sniping really soured me so for now I just buy. |
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Post by Farrar on Apr 27, 2015 21:53:01 GMT -5
If you're like me, you remember exactly where you were and what you were doing on August 14, 2012, the night Ron Palillo died. As a big fan of "Welcome Back, Kotter" and Palillo's beloved Horshack character, I was understandably shaken. Late that night, after several cocktails and viewing a few reruns of the program, I took to ebay and bid a hefty amount for a full set of Mattel's Kotter action figures mint on the card. And won. Handily. The next morning, suffering from a blinding headache and buyer's remorse, I consoled myself with the thought that I would simply turn them around to the biggest Kotter fan on the web. Turns out that person is me. Nearly 3 years later, it is still the highest price ever paid for these items. Do not drink and bid. LMAO! Ah, where are the sniper-bots when you need 'em?  |
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Post by Deleted on Apr 27, 2015 23:31:00 GMT -5
I almost never buy a set price item. Sometimes something is listed at a deal with a set price, but more often than not they're severely overpriced. Sometimes I get frustrated enough to filter them from my searches.
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Post by DE Sinclair on Apr 28, 2015 8:34:05 GMT -5
When I eventually realized that no matter how high I set my max bid I would inevitably still get "sniped" at the last millisecond, I set a couple of max bids as insanely high, LOL. I figured, if someone wants it that badly, let 'em pay for it (yes, I concede I may have been playing right into the seller's hands). I've won over a hundred auctions using the advice of many here: bid your max and hope for the best. I also have a story about over-bidding.
If you're like me, you remember exactly where you were and what you were doing on August 14, 2012, the night Ron Palillo died. As a big fan of "Welcome Back, Kotter" and Palillo's beloved Horshack character, I was understandably shaken. Late that night, after several cocktails and viewing a few reruns of the program, I took to ebay and bid a hefty amount for a full set of Mattel's Kotter action figures mint on the card. And won. Handily.
The next morning, suffering from a blinding headache and buyer's remorse, I consoled myself with the thought that I would simply turn them around to the biggest Kotter fan on the web. Turns out that person is me. Nearly 3 years later, it is still the highest price ever paid for these items.
tl;dr: Do not drink and bid.
Friends don't let friends bid drunk. |
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Post by Randle-El on Apr 28, 2015 9:19:43 GMT -5
I almost never buy a set price item. Sometimes something is listed at a deal with a set price, but more often than not they're severely overpriced. Sometimes I get frustrated enough to filter them from my searches. Pricing is really all over the map on eBay. I've gotten some pretty good deals on eBay, both through auction listings and Buy It Now or Best Offer listings. It's easy to find most things on eBay -- the issue is whether you will find it at a reasonable price. I've gotten what I consider to be good deals on most of the comics I've bought on eBay. However, I also collect Transformers and other anime-related mecha/transforming robots, and within that collector community, eBay has a reputation for being filled with scammers and sellers trying to unload items at ridiculous prices. Part of the reason is because a lot of the items are imported or out-of-production, so they jack the prices up claiming that the toy is rare or to cover import costs. |
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Post by DE Sinclair on Apr 28, 2015 10:05:19 GMT -5
I almost never buy a set price item. Sometimes something is listed at a deal with a set price, but more often than not they're severely overpriced. Sometimes I get frustrated enough to filter them from my searches. Pricing is really all over the map on eBay. I've gotten some pretty good deals on eBay, both through auction listings and Buy It Now or Best Offer listings. It's easy to find most things on eBay -- the issue is whether you will find it at a reasonable price. I've gotten what I consider to be good deals on most of the comics I've bought on eBay. However, I also collect Transformers and other anime-related mecha/transforming robots, and within that collector community, eBay has a reputation for being filled with scammers and sellers trying to unload items at ridiculous prices. Part of the reason is because a lot of the items are imported or out-of-production, so they jack the prices up claiming that the toy is rare or to cover import costs. Unquestionably there is some delusional pricing going on there. I see that with the comic toys as well. |
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Post by benday-dot on Apr 28, 2015 18:36:26 GMT -5
I haven't bought anything on ebay for a couple years now. IMO the "golden age" of comic purchasses on ebay is dead. The amount of actual auctions has steadily been decreasing in favour of "buy it nows" for quite some time now. But more of a contributing factor to my abandonment of ebay are the ridiculous shipping prices that have emerged over the last few years for international packages. I am in Canada. It is not unusual for me see sellers wanting upwards of $30.00 to ship a single comic to north of the border. Crazy! Unfortunately part of that is that US postal rates to Canada have nearly doubled in the last decade. When I was still doing ebay about 8-9 years ago I could send an priority package to Canada for $10 ish dollars and when the rate jumped to $14-15 I stopped doing international sales because it was insane to charge someone that much shipping for an auction that was a fraction of the cost, but I had no choice if it wasn't going to cost me money to have someone else "Win" the auction from me. The same Priority package now costs me over $20 to send, and the box I sent to antoine for the CCE which was slightly larger cost me nearly $40 for a couple dozen comics. Sending it non-priority is not much cheaper and you get no insurance or delivery confirmation, and if you add those back in, the cost is actually more than the priority rate. US Post office revenue was down and they lost a lot of business as e-mail replaced regular mail and other shipping companies took a lot of their business, and the one area they tried to make up for it was by jacking up international postal rates. I'm sure their costs are higher too, but I can't see the rate of increase those rates have undergone in a decade. -M This all too true. And obviously obviously high postage rates are not the fault of principled sellers like yourself Michael, it is too bad for people who live in Canada and elsewhere that most of the worlds American comics are still to be found in, natch, America! |
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Post by Deleted on Apr 28, 2015 20:53:17 GMT -5
I almost never buy a set price item. Sometimes something is listed at a deal with a set price, but more often than not they're severely overpriced. Sometimes I get frustrated enough to filter them from my searches. Pricing is really all over the map on eBay. I've gotten some pretty good deals on eBay, both through auction listings and Buy It Now or Best Offer listings. It's easy to find most things on eBay -- the issue is whether you will find it at a reasonable price. I've gotten what I consider to be good deals on most of the comics I've bought on eBay. However, I also collect Transformers and other anime-related mecha/transforming robots, and within that collector community, eBay has a reputation for being filled with scammers and sellers trying to unload items at ridiculous prices. Part of the reason is because a lot of the items are imported or out-of-production, so they jack the prices up claiming that the toy is rare or to cover import costs. What I always do when buying a comic for more than $4 or so, is check the history of completed listings and see what it actually sells for. You can ask whatever you want on eBay, but things will only sell for what the market will support. A lot of the comics I search for on eBay are scarce enough that there are no recent sales to search, in which case it really requires long term research to make sure you're not getting screwed. But I accept auction prices for what they are, the market setting the price through demand of the product. If it's just two people in an insane pissing match I might take it with a grain of salt, but if when you look through the bids you see multiple interested parties, that's just what the comic is valued at and I'd consider it unrealistic to expect it for less. Especially with today's global market. If a Transformers toy is available for significantly less in Japan, how long until some enterprising individual imports them by the dozen and floods the market undercutting the guy jacking the prices up? That's exactly the kind of thing I used to do when online sales were my thing. |
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Post by SJNeal on Apr 30, 2015 17:12:23 GMT -5
Just bid on shit no one else wants.
It's what I do, and I'm a winner every time!
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Post by Phil Maurice on Apr 30, 2015 17:21:06 GMT -5
Just bid on shit no one else wants. It's what I do, and I'm a winner every time! Oooh, oooh! Can I interest you in a full set of Mattel's "Welcome Back, Kotter" figures, MOC?  |
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Oh well, can't dwell on it, right? Just gotta keep looking, because the demand seems to be lower than I thought if a lot of four could sell that cheap. Sooner or later I'll get my chance. 
