Wow, I have a lot of thoughts on this thread.......I've been an E-bay Seller since 2005, and a buyer since 2003, and 90% of what I do has been related to vintage x86 IBM Compatibles.
Well, I think we all know how it got here. Vintage x86 Hardware is now hot stuff, there's ton of YouTubers doing videos on it now, not just myself (creepingnet) once every 2 years. I've noticed VOGONS has gone from a "let's get this game running on my new i7" forum to a "let's get this vintage 80486 running" forum. Not to mention all those clickbait articles on the internet that are like "15 things you might find in your attic that will make you rich!" and of course #blah is "old computer" and has a picture of like, a 1990's Mac or a 1980's IBM. It's hot stuff ATM. So funny to me because I remember there was a time when I could buy a whole thrift shop out for $20, got chastised by people for having a "PC Jurassic Park", and could treat this stuff like throwaways at times (which with my current skills I wish I had not in a lot of those cases).
Personally, as a buyer, I had to adapt to the new ecosystem. So when I went to look for a DOS laptop, I picked a model that had a "fatal flaw" (cracking plastic) that nobody would want but a willing researcher like myself, and I started kicking those laptops up left and right for $20-75 all day long. Now they are going up because I post too much about them probably. I go for AS/IS, untested stuff I have to fix. My photo galleries really show a lot of that kit-bashing of NEC Versa to get 4 good working examples - which I finished last night BTW with the help of two resistors and a N.O.S. $20 800x600 LCD Panel.
I was told, I think by someone on VOGONS, that BIN stands for "make an offer" - well, I hate to tell that person that's incorrect. I've offered as liittle of a discount of $10 on a $75 item, and either got no answer or "Sorry, I can't do that" or "Lowball". They told me this was specifically true of ridiculously high prices, like an IBM XT for $10,000, or that XT clone that was on there for $500 that looks like someone dragged it out of a swamp with a winch.....yeah right, they think they are selling Carol Shelby's personal Ford Mustang when they have a Fox Body LX with the 4-cylinder and automatic. "Nice Car" but it's not worth that much. If it's $10K then there better be something significant about it, like Bill Gates wrote Donkey on it, or it was Steve Ballmer's personal Deskpro 386 from 1986 that was used for marketing Windows/386 - and there better be proof other than a Microsoft Asset tag! C'mon, I know it's a ThinkPad with the butterfly keyboard, but is it really worth having it posted up for $10,599.99 for 7 years straight with no buyers? It was not even that expensive in 1994 when it came out!
Now, as a seller, I can say it's not as cheap as it used to be to sell a PC. I miss the days like 2005 when couriers were still cheap. I sold an IBM EduQuest back then for $75, and spent only $25 in shipping, and this was an AIO PC with a CRT built into it! Now just to sell two modern laptops I had to spend almost $50 in shipping, and got ****ed tender by PayPal and E-bay when I had to pull the sale because I could not afford shipping due to then unexpected, unrelated financial hardships! I've come to a point I might start using VC Marketplace or AmiBay to sell because I can use Venmo or someone other than PayFiend (PayPal) - whom I've been trying to get my account repaired for five+ months now, with little to no help. Seriously, **** PayPal!. Irritating because I was initally gong to use E-bay this year to sell some lesser used stuff in my collection - looks like that's not happening through evil-bay. I should not need to spend a total of 200 minutes on the phone (I counted them up) plus 10 e-mails just to get my account reset!