What is it with people and ebay?

sar-photo

sar-photo

Simon Robinson
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11:42 PM
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Jul 6, 2008
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I needed a 82mm WA Adaptor ring for my Lee filter holder and have been watching one on ebay. It reached £38 yesterday (+ £2.99 postage) so I decided to buy one new from Morco for £40 (free postage).

I just had another look at the one on ebay and with 3.5 hours left it is up to £41 :confused:

Don't people know how much things cost new?

Simon
 
No. I have observed over the years that, paradoxically, ebay is good for sellers and terrible for buyers. I don't understand folks who will pay the KEH "market" price for a used piece of gear from an unknown seller with effectively no warranty and no legal protections, other than a claim of mail fraud, if things go wrong. I am sure there is something I am missing. Is the incremental value of a warranty from a real store roughly equal to the entertainment value of "winning" an auction? This is a real mystery to me. Economists? Psychologists? Folks possessed of horse-sense? Help me out here.
 
Sometimes people live in places where online retailers charge high shipping charges to ship to or may not ship to altogether. Exchange rates are another factor to consider as well. What costs £40 to you may cost relatively more in another country. Ebay is just another option for them to get the best overall deal.
 
Well just this Sunday I was looking for a deal and thought I'd low-bid... but instead of $340, I put in $430.... doh! But it was for an item that is $569 new, so it wasn't a horrible mistake.
 
Look at the sellers on there like Camera$, gokevincameras, and olympusUSA (which is not Olympus, its a Russian guy) that sell only through buy-it-now with prices always at 3-4 times the KEH prices. Must be some idiot somewhere buying or these guys would be gone...right?
 
I think theres a variety of things going on-
* rebate schemes - used to be windows live / now ebay bucks / credit card bonus points / etc
* foreign buyers who dont have access to same prices locally.. but know ebay sellers will ship to locales that a normal .com site wont
* market size - what % of people know about keh? everybody knows about ebay.
* auction psychology - people being idiots

Id put all of the above as much larger contributors than underhanded schemes like shill bidding. And shill doesnt explain Buy it now pricing.

Never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to laziness/stupidity.
 
ebay used to be a lot cheaper, I bought my M8 from a camera shop with a years warranty for ebay prices! It did come with a never-ready case that I sold on ebay for £100:D
 
When I first discovered ebay about 10 years ago, I bid on a few items, thinking at the low prices, how good a bargain it was. When I was bid beyond that, I sort of figured how dare those people? I would place more bids just to pay them back. Fortunately there were others thinking the same thing. I only did that 3 or 4 times and I suddenly realized I could get stuck buying something for a lot more than I wanted to. I quit that foolishness!

Now I only bid on things I really want, and usually decide what my high bid will be before my first bid. I either put that bid down to begin with, or bid up to that and stop. I think there are still some who do what I did those first 3 or 4 times. Others may just not know what something is worth, or want it bad enough at that particular time to over bid.

But truely there are some sale prices that are beyond understanding. And as for the Camera$ and Arsenal type sellers, they are apprently making money. I don't know how, but sure wish I did.
 
eBay is a series of market places that often don't overlap.
Of course I look at camera items on ebay but the pattern of bidding seems quite different to another, 'stamps'. In the first there is a general feeling for values partly because you can always track prices for completed listings and something like an Olympus OM-1 is very much a known item. In the 'stamps' market place there are are 'envelopes' - covers to the collector - that are very difficult to value. Some are unique - if you want that item and don't win it the chances of finding another the same are zero, and another very similar not very high. And because of the expanse of material available the determined specialist collector will know far more about many items than the seller. On the face of it it could appear that I have paid over the odds for the most recent item I have won in the 'stamps' section. What the cursory glance that only takes in the postage stamps misses, is the significance of amount of postage, the date, and postal route. I now have a very interesting addition to my accumulation - I hesitate to call it a collection!
The point I'm making is that eBay is not a uniform market place. You could find that bidding for a silver spoon or a lawn mower is a very different experience from bidding on a camera adaptor ring.
jesse
 
You never know but, if you bid on it then it had that value to you. I've bought a few things from eBay and most times come out ahead until the last purchase. I bought some new sets of Parker T Ball pens and pencils for about half what the local statioary store was charging. Got them and was very happy until a couple of weeks later I walked into a local computer shop and saw a stack sitting at the checkout counter. I bought 28 sets each for less than half what I paid for the eBay for the same sets. At first I was upset with the eBay transactio but soon realized they were still a good buy in their own right. I've bought pieces for my Bronica system and paid about half what the guys up here want to charge but, the key is to wait and not get sucked in.
 
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