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Putting a price on a memory (Ebay & Gaming)
Lindsay Lohan
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So - I've seen threads about selling games but all the sites seem to be more for current games. I'm considering getting rid of one or both of my classic consoles (Atari/NES, 100+ games each) as they don't get any play and were mostly just something for me to search for and collect. Obviously, ebay seems to be the place to be for classic consoles. My question is how do you figure out a fair price for something like this?
I've checked closed ebay auctions, and see similar sized collections (NES)hitting about $350 but they are collections that tend to have alot of crap and filler in them, certainly not the hand picked glory that is my corner of the NES world. Has anybody done something like this recently or have any tips on ebaying large collections - search terms, setting a good reserve price, the additional ebay listing features that might actually be worth the $$, etc? I've only ever sold one thing on ebay previously so it's a strange new world for me...
I've checked closed ebay auctions, and see similar sized collections (NES)hitting about $350 but they are collections that tend to have alot of crap and filler in them, certainly not the hand picked glory that is my corner of the NES world. Has anybody done something like this recently or have any tips on ebaying large collections - search terms, setting a good reserve price, the additional ebay listing features that might actually be worth the $$, etc? I've only ever sold one thing on ebay previously so it's a strange new world for me...
Lindsay Lohan on
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Wouldn't that be a nightmare though - dealing with tons of auctions and people requesting combined shipping, etc? My impression is that it would take me hours just to list everything.
It would be a lot of work, but you'd get much more in total than if you listed the entire collections together.
Otherwise I think you already have a good idea of what it will get by looking a previous auctions.
You'll probably end up with $400 or so on a combined auction. If you have 100 games and lets say 50% were worth something and went for an average of $10 while the other 50% averaged at $5 while the console itself went for $50, that would be a total of about $800.
all the numbers were pulled out of my ass, so do some investigation to find the actual price and then decide if the extra money is worth your time. If you feel its not worth it to go through the extra effort, then its not.
I did this a number of years back with my NES/SNES/Genesis era stuff. The number one problem isn't even the listing -- it's the paperwork and red tape when all of the auctions go off at once and you have 50 people e-mailing you and Paypalling money and sending money orders and stuff. But it's not bad if you're prepared and expecting the onslaught of communication beforehand.
When I listed everything, I had a text template prepared beforehand; it had an introductory "You are bidding on Game X...", a blank space, and then two or three paragraphs with all of my bidding/shipping/fine print-type info. From there it's a matter of cutting and pasting, then typing a few lines about the game itself. All of the shipping cost info was the same.
If you do go this route and you're new to eBay, I suggest spacing out the auctions, like only 3-5 a day or something. That way they won't all go off at once, and it's less of a headache.
Good plan. You can easily get an idea of what you're likely to get selling everything separately vs as a bundle and then you can decide if the difference is worth the significant amount of work involved. It will come down to how much you value your time. If you can make $400 extra by putting in 10 hours of work, for instance, you might decide it's worth it. If the difference is only $40 then you might say screw it and just sell the lot at once.
It's not an either or proposition, either. You might be able to break it up in to smaller bundles and increase your return without creating the amount of work that selling everything individually would entail.
Especially if they're boxed.
I'm not sure if they have those free Priority Mail boxes anymore, though; I think it depends on location. My family also has a compulsion to keep a crapload of boxes, so shipping materals was never really a problem/cost for me. I'd swing by a post office and see what they have.
If you were looking for 3 games to complete a collection, would you search for a lot or for those 3 games?
The most you would "lose" is simply having no one bid on it, in other words. It's far better to simply have the starting price be $400 than messing with a reserve, which is essentially worthless on eBay.
As a matter of fact, they still do have free boxes!
http://shop.usps.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductCategoryDisplay?catalogId=10152&storeId=10001&categoryId=13353&langId=-1&parent_category_rn=11820&top_category=11820
Sorry for the long link, but yep go there and you can get some free USPS boxes to ship with!