O/T Pet Peeve on Best Offers (Ebay)

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Posted By: Eric Brehm

Not to belabor this point, but okay, I'm convinced that a seller's investment in a card should generally be irrelevant as far as what I should be willing to pay for it. I should really only be concerned about whether the price is acceptable to me or not. There are two cases recently however where I did take the seller's potential profit into account:

(1) In this case, which I think I described previously, the seller bought a card for about $2600 and then immediately offered it for sale (BIN/Best Offer) with a $1000+ mark-up. He knew I needed the card for one of my sets and contacted me directly to see if I was interested. And I happened to know what he had paid for it. I was willing to pay a strong price for the card (it was a low pop card that is rarely offered), but I told him $1000 profit on an immediate turn-around didn't seem fair, so I offered $3000, which he accepted and closed the listing. Had I not known the history behind the card I might have offered more for it, closer to the listed BIN price, to make sure I won it. On the other hand, heck I don't know, maybe my sense of 'fairness' didn't really have much to do with it -- I was willing to pay $3000, and he was willing to sell it for that, so for us, on that day, that was 'market value'.

(2) I bought a large lot of high grade vintage cards from someone who was liquidating a portion of their collection. He offered the cards to me at the price he originally paid for each of them, with a premium added (i.e. profit for him) based on a fixed percentage of the original price. So the pricing for each card was not based on current market value, but rather on the seller getting a reasonable return on his investment. In some cases this meant I got a good deal on the card (if his original investment was low), and in others I probably paid above market, after his profit percentage was factored in. Generally, the cards had not appreciated significantly in value since the seller originally acquired them, so on average, I probably ended up paying more for the cards, to get them all in one fell swoop, than if I had been willing to wait patiently for each of them to turn up somewhere for sale in the future. Maybe I'm a fool for paying above market for anything (though as Bruce says that can be an elusive concept, especially for relatively scarce items), but the pricing scheme offered by the seller in this case seemed fair enough to me and I went for it.

I also did another deal, with a different seller, for another large lot of high grade cards, but in that case, the pricing was based on estimated FMV. I have no idea what the seller's original investment in any of the cards was. In this case I probably paid closer to FMV than I did in case (2) above, so in retrospect, this deal worked out better for me.

By the way, back on the main topic, I have had reasonable offers ignored by BIN sellers. They just let the offer expire without ever contacting me. I didn't think that was terribly rude, but it did sort of leave me hanging; I would rather in such situations that they decline my offer, so I can either consider making another offer, or just move on to something else.