Stamp Collecting In Reverse

If a dealer is not in a hurry to sell, they can put an aspirational price tag on an item and let it sit in inventory for literally years hoping to find a buyer at that price, or at least find someone to make an offer.

Also, just like clothing stores in shopping malls, some sellers will price their items very high and then offer coupons or have a "40% off Holiday Sale", for example, which will reduce the items to a more normal retail price.

To find prices for what items actually sold for (auction and Buy it Now), do your search on eBay, and then in the left column of checkboxes and filters, scroll down to the end and click on "Sold Items". That will show you a list of items that sold in the last month or so and the selling price of those items.


If a buyer submitted an offer for an item that the seller agreed to, the original price will be crossed out with a note "Best Offer Accepted". In this case you will only know the original listing price of an item that was sold, not the actual sale price of the offer that was accepted. Other than that situation, looking at the Sold prices is a more realistic survey of the market than the dealer's listing prices.

ZebraMan:

I prefer to select "completed items" rather than "sold items." This way, I can see if there are dozens of the item that ended and only one or two got sales. It seems that there are often the occasional outliers in which items that "never" sell do, indeed, find an interested buyer. If that's one in a hundred, then that's useful information to pair with listing(s) that sold.

I feel like Ebay doesn't show the asking price on BIN listings when displaying sold/completed items; only prices realized. So, that occasional sale may have been haggled down substantially from original asking price.

I ***DON'T*** know how to search completed or sold items on HipStamp/StampWants. Do you know how to do this?

Josh