One of the hard things for dealers is the need to balance selling inventory and having inventory. When it comes down to it, nearly all dealer stocks could be sold in under a month if they really wanted it gone. Some could even do that and still have profit.
In a way inventory is advertising.
How often do you pass by a table at a show because you take one look and just know they probably don't have what you're looking for?
Pricing that inventory so you have sales and profit, and enough better stuff to attract customers is harder than it seems. The biggest challenge at times is simply replacing inventory.
Shops- Generally have prices that are a bit high but need to be because of overhead. And many aren't all that flexible.
Shows - If someone only does shows, their prices are usually a bit lower, or there's more flexibility on price.
Flea markets - Yeah, flea markets. A whole range of pricing strategies. From everything dirt cheap because they don't want to drag it around anymore, to reasonable, to what I came to refer to as "imaginative" (The ones I used to go to were all under power lines- That might have something to do with the pricing.
) Usually there's a load of flexibility. When I was selling at flea markets occasionally I had stuff marked with the catalog value or what I figured retail would be. Most stuff I'd take far less. The OJ rookie? Yeah, catalogs 90, but I'll take 20. The signature rookies signed Jeter? Nope, catalogs 30 and that's what I want. (And that should give you an idea how long ago that was) Many I'd take half of what was marked. But then I was only selling once a year or so.
Ebay for all they've done to try and make it more retail/amazon like is still like a big crazy flea market. And I think everyone is still trying to figure out the best way to make it work. Ebay themselves probably want the boatloads of overpriced things to stay. When someone looks the category says there are around 2.9 million baseball cards. Of course I'll look, there's probably something I want. Other online auction places have fewer, bidstart has about 64 thousand. And the impression is that there's nothing there to buy. So there's fewer buyers and sellers.
The two items shown - Looking at the sellers other stuff some of it is pretty reasonable. One seems to be unfamiliar with sports stuff other than it's worth a lot of money. The other does cards, and is a bit more reasonable on his other stuff.
High priced items can also be a bit of an ad, the two posted got me to look at their other stuff, so it's done better than a lot of other ads.
Retail does stuff like that all the time. When Toshiba had a 48 inch crt television the shop had a big sign out on the mall. "Come see the worlds largest crt television!" It was impressive, and got a lot of people into the store. Sports cars and sponsoring racing teams are the same thing. Chevy doesn't really make enough money on Corvettes, except for the people that go in to look and get something else.
Steve B