Quote:
Originally Posted by Bambino
Originally, ebay lived up to the saying "one man's garbage is another man's treasure." You had a lot more people who were just trying to move items and make some money because as it turned out, they couldn't buy diapers or food with Ken Griffey Jr. cards.
Nowadays, it seems people aren't willing to settle for "some money". They want book value or more and will not settle for less. So they set super-high reserve prices or they end auctions early if the bids are too low. Just set a "buy it now" for what you want in return and stop wasting everyone's time pretending this is an auction. If you put up a Mickey Mantle rookie card in mint condition and start the bidding at 1 cent with no reserve - you need to be willing and able to sell that card for 1 cent.
And so it doesn't sound like I'm placing all the blame on the sellers...buyers need to do some more research before you bid on an item. I've seen cases where they'll bid a certain amount on one card, see it for cheaper somewhere else, and then cancel their bid or refuse to pay. It's not the seller's fault that you didn't do some price comparisons before bidding.
That being said...
Leon - I'm not a internet wiz, so I'm not sure if this is even possible - but if you could find a way to allow actual paypal/credit card transactions on this message board - I think you've found the best of both worlds.
In other words, if I start a thread to sell a Hank Aaron rookie card, it would be amazing for people to be able to bid on, make offers for and even pay for an item within that very thread. In another scenario, someone mentions that they would love to buy a Sandy Koufax 1956 Topps card - how awesome would it be if I could reply to that post with a scan of that very Koufax card and give them the ability to click on a buy button within my post to purchase it?
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ok....so here is a possible solution....list a card on GSB....put a link on the BST in the auction section to it......then someone can click on it and buy it and pay with anything they want to, including paypal, right there.....and the seller gets a ton of other value-adds for the 2% or less it will cost. I don't think there will ever be paypal and those other things on our BST...though obviously you can use paypal to pay for cards bought from the BST, you just have to click over to it....
To be fair, I would be careful about posting auctions on GSB right now, unless you start at a price you can live with. I would rather something NOT sell there than the seller be disappointed with the realized price. Hopefully that will change with the monumental changes that will come in the future....the future being about 3 mos to 6 mos away.....