Subject:
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To sell or to auction, that is the question.
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.market.theory
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Date:
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Tue, 5 Oct 1999 17:41:54 GMT
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Viewed:
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385 times
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Okay, so I listed 25 sets in market.buy-sell-trade last night. I also listed
asking prices. When I stopped home for lunch today, I did a quick check of
email and found that I have over 10 messages responding to my list of sets. As
of now, I have every intention to follow through with everyone on a first-come,
first-serve set-by-set basis, selling the sets for the asking price, accepting
negotiations later. But I have a couple questions to pose here, hopefully they
will help me if/when I list a second group of sets for sale/auction.
First, say I've got 14 emails (meaning 14 prospective interested buyers) and
combined they want to buy 18 of my 25 sets (purely hypothetical numbers). Now,
there are two bidders who each have interest in 5 sets each, 4 bidders
interested in 3 sets each, 6 bidders interested in 2 sets each, and 2 bidders
who only want one of the sets. Obviously there is overlap here, 14 bidders
wanting 36 sets, but only 18 distinct sets are desired. In other words, sets
A,B,C have 4 people interested, sets D,E,F,G have 3 people interested sets
F,G,H,I have 2 people interested and the remaining 7 sets only have a single
buyer. How do I, the fair and honest seller, resolve this situation? On one
hand, it is preferable to sell to the buyers who want the most sets, reducing
the number of people I am dealing with. But how does one manage to do this
fairly?
Second, at what volume of interest does it become necessary/appropriate to turn
the sale into an auction? Is it "okay" to do this? What about auctioning just
the top 3 sets that each had 4 people interested? Or do I auction the top 7
sets with 3 or 4 people interested? Additionally, if I've already emailed
someone and said the set is theirs, I can't very well email again and say
"sorry, no sale - it's going into an auction now".
Third, how do I handle people who want to negotiate lower prices, or who offer
more $ without me asking? Say buyer #1 was first and wants sets C,D,F and
wants to pay $2 less than asking price on all of them. Buyer #2 was second and
wants C,F and offers to pay $2 mor than asking (with no prompting from me).
Buyer #3 wants D,F and wants to pay asking price for both. How should
this scenario be resolved? Does the price offered take precedence over
chronological order of emails received?
Lastly, I'd skimmed threads discussing how "accepting offers" is really not an
auction, but a sale. No formal auction parameters are used, just a period of
time where offers are accepted and the highest offer gets the set(s). Is this
an acceptable "middle ground" between cancelling a sale and switching to
auction? If there are multiple people interested in the same set, let those
people who respond in the first X (48?) hours revise their offer and the
highest wins? Should an accepting offers type sale be stated up front, or can
this be decided after an interest level determined?
On a related note, I have a hard time being strictly first-come, first-serve.
The people here (and on RTL) are international, spanning many timezones. And
people check the groups once a day, every other day, some just once a week. I
don't want to keep someone from having a fair chance at a set b/c Mr. Smith
hovers over the groups 6 times a day waiting to find the best deals. At the
same time, sales avoid the auction timeframe and commitment.
Since I have already listed the list of sets as FS: so I'm pretty committed to
following through this time. I probably jumped the gun last night, I typed up
the long file with all the set descriptions - I guess I was excited to post it
and get these sold.
Sorry this is wordy, I'm typing as I think. Any feedback from those of you who
are market-savvy would be great!
-Mike Ulring
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Message has 2 Replies:
 | | Re: To sell or to auction, that is the question.
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| (...) Any 'sale starting now' announcement is going to be "unfair" to the people who don't see it right away. If you want to give everyone equal opportunity to react, then use one of: an auction (with a reasonable time frame), a 'best offer by' (...) (25 years ago, 5-Oct-99, to lugnet.market.theory)
| | | Re: To sell or to auction, that is the question.
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| When to sell. The fist bider that: a) Agrees to your price b) Is happing with shipping arangments c) Is happy with your payment terms Gets the item. Self manged auctions. Too much work! Ebay (etc) Auctions a) Some bidders never pay. b) With Ebay, (...) (25 years ago, 6-Oct-99, to lugnet.market.theory)
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