I've noticed this recently with floppy drives and hard drives. Some people may easily want more than $100 for a pair of floppy drives. Yet a computer CPU unit with the same drives might be slightly less, although with more shipping. I suspect some sellers are removing drives from perfectly fine machines and discarding the rest just because they are easier to ship. (Of course, if it was a rust bucket, that's fine).[*]Price more than cost of computer it came from.
Does anyone know what's going on there?
BTW: I just went and checked something. I just bought a buy-it-now item for $9.99 (not including shipping) with "seller offer". But the sold item listing still shows "$13.99". De-cep-tive.
To be fair as a seller I think thats actually a good thing. Why? Well lets say maybe you have alot of one product you are looking to sell but lately it hasn't been selling much. So you make an offer and some takes it for less than asking price. If everyone out there knows what you sold it for, they will all make the same offer and noone would buy it at asking price. Sometimes all you need is a sale, and then next time a random person sees the listing it says things like "1 sold in 1 hour" or " 2 sold in 24 hours". People are strange sometimes they feel better knowing they are following the crowd, not wanting to be the only one they perceive doing something... I'm the complete opposite on that, but I have noticed alot of people behave in this way.
Sold items on which the seller had accepted a best offer used to have the full asking price crossed out and stated "best offer accepted" below it. It didn't specify which price was accepted, but at least let other people know that an offer had been accepted.To be fair as a seller I think thats actually a good thing. Why? Well lets say maybe you have alot of one product you are looking to sell but lately it hasn't been selling much. So you make an offer and some takes it for less than asking price. If everyone out there knows what you sold it for, they will all make the same offer and noone would buy it at asking price.
Heres something noone seems to have really mentioned. Shipping fees!. I just boxed up a computer to send to California (from new england). Of course I compare rates and prices. Normally this weights between 45lbs and 55lbs (this was 50.5lbs). Cheapest rates I could get were with UPS for $78 dollars!!!! I mean for the past year on average I have been paying about $50.00 for shipping a computer, somewhat more to the west coast or pacific northwest. Good thing I upped the shipping fee for this item, but in truth, with the money ebay takes from what I charge for shipping (yes ebay takes a percentage of everything you make including shipping) some of this came out of pocket! I can understand now why so many sellers have a flat rate of $100.00 for shipping.
What is going on with shipping rates?!
FWIW I went though a similar situation last Christmas when shipping to one granddaughter in Albuquerque [FONT=Roboto, arial, sans-serif]and the other in Salt Lake City from Michigan. The lady at the post office said it was the weight that was the determining factor. Completely opposite of their no weight limit 1st class boxes.[/FONT]
I've learned a simple trick on Ebay to always "Watch" an item first, and for items with no rush to purchase required due to demand/ scarcity it almost always yields me a seller discount offer within minutes to maybe an hour. Generally some kind of generic 10-20% off discount, but it almost is a 90% assurance of happening with major sellers. That usually covers shipping. And it allows for making a direct counter-offer that does not show up as an offer to the masses which could trigger other watchers into buying. Ebay requires some psychology knowledge of how people act/react in competitive auction environments. And that includes sellers too.
I often look up sellers, see what they are selling, and how much they sell so that I can judge how likely they would be to accept certain offers. My methods do seem like a lot of work, but it surely pays off for me in cost savings. I don't get everything I'd like, but I'm always pleasantly surprised how easy it can be to talk down a seller, especially bigger ticket items they have held on to for too long. Or the people obviously offloading an estate.