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Making Offers
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It is not our policy to make offers—OK. Why? Well, they seldom work. If an item worth $100 was offered to us and we were to offer say $75 leaving us a profit margin of $25, this would probably very fair; right?; except it generally does not work this way. If for instance the person who owns the item had thought it’s worth maybe $25 and was now offered three times as much, it naturally makes this person think, “Wow!” Maybe it’s worth 10 times that amount and instead of taking the $75 offer, he/she goes searching the web for someone else who might offer more (it invariably works this way). Now alternatively consider this: suppose I were to offer a thousand dollars for an item worth $2,000 and the seller had in mind only about $100. What have I done? I have overbid by $900, haven’t I? Well that’s fine for the seller and possibly OK for us as well because we don’t want to short-shift anyone, but also invariably this ends up with the seller in “shock and awe!” and again, he/she will not sell to us but will go off looking for a better price yet! Alternatively, we have had in the past persons who did jump on our offer and tell us fine, I’ll take it and then we don’t hear from them again because after 10 minutes off the phone they went looking for “A Few Dollars More” and often I’ll hear from them after a week or two saying that an emergency in the family came up or almost any other excuse, but now they will sell the item for my offer. Well, what really has transpired is that predictably they have gone off on the proverbial (treasure hunt) and didn’t succeed so naturally they are back to us. Sometimes I will stand by the offer if I made one, but usually I will tell this hunter of riches that now we will seriously renegotiate. Better yet, we would really rather have the person tell us what they are hoping for and perhaps that will be a good guess and we will immediately agree to pay it and if it’s not good, in fact ridiculous , we will immediately inform the seller and we might even offer evidence of why it’s not feasible. What we do request is this: when you do say what you hoped for and we agree to pay it that you don’t disappear into cyber space with the notion that you can get even more. We will often pay all of what an item might be worth just to have it on our site. But bear in mind: this is a business and we do this as a living vocation. So if we pay your price of $1.00 and you see it on our site at $2.00, don’t panic, because you might be able to buy it back for $1.05. So in closing I need to tell you that we also need to do a lot of guessing at the worth of items and could be off by a great deal, but we always have to bear this in mind: an item is only worth what a person will pay for it. That is in the end the crucial factor! |