Collectible Nancy Drew #1 The Secret Of The Old Clock
The book is priced at $99.99 with the Best Offer option available. What really strikes me funny is the seller's user ID. I took a screen cap since the listing will not be available for viewing months from now; click on it so that you can read it.
Funny, yes?
8 comments:
That is pretty funny. Did someone make an offer?
Oops, obviously not. Some people are just in their own little worlds, I guess....
There is an offer in the history that has expired. I wonder if the seller just chose to ignore it. I also notice another offer that was canceled due to entering the wrong amount. I have never seen that before. Odd.
I would never submit an offer on a listing like this one, because I know that there is absolutely no way that the seller would accept a $5.00 offer. The seller clearly thinks this a valuable book, so I would think that the seller wants $50 or more for it. I could be wrong, but suffice it to say that the high price will scare most people off.
That is crazy! I was watching a Penny Parker last week. It didn't sell for a minimum of $38 and is now back up with a buy it now offer of $65! Some people just don't get it do they??
It's funny you mentioned that Penny Parker book. Jenn just emailed me about it. Why do people think that raising the price of a book to an even more outrageous price will help it sell? If people did not want to pay $38.50 for that book on one listing or $48.50 on two other listings, why does the seller think they will want to pay $65.00 on the current listing?
Although it does not make logical sense, there are times when an increased price actually results in a sale. In the 1990s a bookseller colleague said "never own a book you can't mark up" and by that he was describing the curious situation of a book that wouldn't sell at $20 but was suddenly more interesting at $80.
Having a book in a store where people look at it is a little like eBay. The buyer wants a reassurance that their interest in a book is justified by a higher price from the seller who knows something about the book.
In this case, I would not be surprised if eBay was offering a deal on fixed price listings (because they think they are so much more interesting to buyers than auctions) and the seller named a price that is what they hoped it would sell for in a good economy with competitive bidding.
Often the people who know the least about books and book pricing are mortally afraid that they will sell a book at too low of a price will overprice nearly everything. The only saving grace is that sometimes their "high" price is actually a low one for some truly scarce items. However, so little of their other overpriced stock sells that there isn't room for new material for those gems to appear.
The auction prices on eBay should be an indicator of a book's value but it is all a matter of an appropriate starting bid and enough people noticing the auction. As we've said before, right now eBay is largely a buyer's market.
James
That is funny--I had e-mailed Jennifer about that one, thought that was weird to relist at a higher price--maybe to help cover the increasing fee count for listing fees and not selling :) But I guess some sellers do like to play around with prices and see what happens.
Jenn:)
It was kind of funny to get two comments about the same book from different people in just a few hours' time.
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