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In the reverse of the situation, if you saw a complete stranger selling a guitar for a fair amount under it's value (say a genuine LP Custom for £700) would you contact them and offer them a truer price? If you then bought that guitar for the £700 but couldn't bond or needed money for something else on would you sell it on at the under priced £700 in the interest of fairness?
I reckon it's safe to say that virtually all would say no to both.
I can appreciate how it's annoying but whatever you agree to sell for you must have been happy with. TBH for the amount of effort it takes and the fees incurred I doubt these 'trader/flippers' make much on a deal very often and mostly is just chicken feed for a lot of toing and froing. There plenty of guys around here that have being doing the same with cars for years and none of them have swimming pools yet.
Seems absolutely fine to me. Whereas this…
…is where it starts to grate.
He's probably not making a lot of money on them.
He's likely to be paying £1080 by the time he pays for insured tracked delivery.
When he sells he will be paying £75 Ebay fees plus another £50 or so in Paypal fees which will take his total outlay over £1200. If he's only getting £1300 then he's not got a big margin and he's making less than £100. If he gets closer to £1500 then he'll make a decent amount. Trading on Ebay isn't entirely risk free either. If one deal goes bad on him then he'd need to sell another 10 or so to get the money back.
You do get better prices on Ebay sometimes than on the forum or Gumtree, but I'm not sure I'd sell something expensive on there - especially with stories like this doing the rounds:
http://www.theguardian.com/money/2013/dec/09/seller-beware-listing-ebay
Ebay is generally a last resort for me when selling these days. With high end guitars I'll put them in a shop on a commission sale.
Don't get me wrong I've snapped up a few bargains in my time and sold on eventually at a profit. But I've not concisely set out to do it, just stumbled upon things in shops and once at a car boot!
For example I don't have two eBay accounts one for buying and one for selling...
just because you do, doesn't mean you should.
This happened to me with the last guitar I sold on Music Radar.
Agreed a price and, in the spirit of helping out a "brother seamus", ended up picking up the paypal fees and, IIRC, postage myself , only to see the guitar straight up on ebay (with my photos from here!) at something like 40% more. As with @kos5151 it then sold at this price!
However it's totally the new owner's business what they do with something. I got the cash to pay for a guitar that I much prefer, which was my objective. I felt the new owner's ebay description was rather hyped and would not have been comfortable with it myself and that's the key to it for me. I have been very lucky at various times to benefit from the kindness and generosity of friends and fellow forumites and hope that I do my best to be the same with others. On my deathbed I'm more likely to wish I was a nicer person than someone who screwed a few quid extra from people at every opportunity.
I've sold stuff on at prices slightly below what I'd prefer, just because I'd rather have it sell quickly rather than have it potentially sit for a couple of months to make a bit of extra cash. It really depends on the item and the price, and if I think a sale at the price I want is realistic within the time frame I want the cash by. To me, if all I'm going to get for waiting several months is a couple of quid then I can't be bothered. If we're talking a couple of hundred quid though, I'd wait.
It is a bit galling when you see something you've sold being offered for twice what you sold it for, mind, which I have a couple of times recently, but such is life. What goes around and all that.
I've advertised pedals (here and on the old MR site) with a price based on Ebay completed auctions, and had no interest until I've dropped it 10 to 15%. Normally people then offer me another 10% off that - sometimes more.
I've come to the conclusion that if I don't get any interest at a price I like then I'm better off Ebaying things. I don't always get better prices on Ebay, but I did get £107 on Ebay for a Line6 FBV shortboard that I couldn't sell advertised at £70 on here.
For guitars, it does depend on the model, but if you can afford to be patient then you are better off using a shop that does commission sales for high end instruments.
I tried to sell an early PRS Singlecut (with 10 top) on the old MR site. I'd probably get around £1100 - 1200 for that from a shop on commission if I'm willing to be patient. I advertised it on MR with a start price of somewhere around £1400 or £1450 to give myself room to drop the price a few days later, and for people to haggle after that. I had a number of people derail my thread telling me that I was asking too much and it would never sell unless I dropped it to somewhere around £1000. I'm not going to do that if I can get £1100 plus elsewhere.
I was probably hoping to sell it on the forum for around £1275 - I make £75 more than the most I would get from the shop, and the buyer saves a couple of hundred as well. Everyone wins apart from the shop, and George Osbourne who doesn't get any VAT. The response I got made that completely impossible.
You'd expect forum prices to be a lower than you'd pay in a shop, and a bit lower than you'd pay on Ebay - especially as the seller has no fees to pay on the forum. However, I don't think it's fair on someone selling to expect them to take a really low price when they can get more elsewhere.
It does depend on how quickly you want to sell things as well. If you have it advertised at the top end of the market in a shop, then it may take a while to sell, but if it's a good guitar someone will come along and fall in love with it eventually. If you want to sell it next week then you have to drop the price for a quick sale regardless of whether it's in a shop or online.
e.g. A guitar you flog on Ebay for £999 will cost you £109 in ebay and paypal fees (assuming you get paid by paypal), so the same guitar with a paypal gift (or fees paid) on here - you are better off with anything over £890. Plus of course ebay charge based on your postal cost too now which adds to it further.
Interesting point. I sold an Ibanez for £650 last year and lo and behold that was another one that wound up on Gumtree for twice the price that I'd sold it to the seller. The funny thing was, outside of the initial thought of 'cheeky bastard' I didn't really bat an eyelid, because I know that the guy had owned it for a while and had actually played it. There is something a bit more jarring when you sell an item and it ends up on eBay within hours.
What was the guitar that got the 100% mark-up?