@marionbrandis wrote:Ebay has now removed the faint blue 'listing' link as well - so no way of checking out sold listings. How are we supposed to research what price to charge of pay for an item when we cannot see the details of sold items? Please, Ebay, enable that feature again.
I agree that it can be annoying not being able to see solds; but it does have the benefit of weaning sellers off what "everyone else is doing" and pricing at what they feel is right.
Too often I have seen solds for an item that I deep down know everyone is pricing too low, because that is what everyone else is doing. Nowadays, I will just use solds as a rough ballpark range and then price on the high end, if I feel the item warrants it, possibly even higher than the highest of the solds.
And it works.
Best example happened back in May this year.
Since we had not had a land line since we switched from CenturyLink to Charter, I decided it was time to sell off this little bugger...
Solds here showed quite a few at the time in the $50 to $75 range, with a mix of fixed price and auctions that only got one or two bids. There were also a couple in the lower triple digits at around $100 to $150, and one that actually did get some real bidding action and ended at around $250 (odd that many of those $50 to $75 listings had been listed after the big one ended. Can't imagine so many sellers leaving that much money on the table).
Anyway, I decided that I would give it a 4 month listing cycle on the other E at $300, and 9 or 10 days later (original date stamp on the pictures for the listing were 20-MAY; but can't recall if it was listed same day or was on the next day's docket), I was $300 richer thanks to my decision to set my own "standard" instead of following everyone else.
And that is only the most prominent of many such scenarios. Gut instinct is often more accurate than what everyone else is doing to where my policy has become start on the high end; then you can always work your way down gradually to lower prices.
Unless there are a metric buttload of endeds where the well is undoubtedly poisoned to where the race to the bottom has reached its conclusion, then endeds are not as accurate an indicator of what to expect due to auctions typically getting very few bids nowadays and fixed price sales only indicating what that one buyer at that point in time was willing to pay.
