need serious help with pricing magnesias

[American]

Keep in mind that the vast majority of "buy it now" bottles on ebay do not sell

 

[Timelypicken]

Things sell for double to triple the actual worth on eBay because the rich city bottle collectors who don’t dig and just buy are willing to pay that price.

 

[saratogadriver]

For sale online vs Actual price realized for a sold item online are often quite a ways apart. If you can search Ebay sold listings you'll get a sense of what a bottle will really bring, or at least what it would bring that day.

Jim G

 

[treeguyfred]

so many years ago I would keep everything I found while digging and after some time discovered I had a monstrous quantity of commons.... Bromos and MOM's. When I joined a north jersey bottle club I used to set up a table at our show and sale... It took literally YEEEEars to weed out my chunkers at 50 cents to a dollar each. Mind you, I never brought home ANY screw tops or snap tops, only tooled stuff. At one time I had almost a hundred tooled lip MOM's and Bromos of the most amazing shade runs from cornflower blue to saffire with cobalt and teal in between and my friendly club members would lovingly joke with me about having one of the prettiest worthless collection of leave behinds they had ever seen! Some where I still have prolly a dozen mixed left overs.
But! hey, these time's they are a changing... and the bottles we old fecks were tossing are prolly going to continue to gain some limited popularity... And its been said before too, if you like 'em thats what counts.
~Fred

 

[treeguyfred]

And as Leon and Robby and prolly a few others have said... what ppl are asking for is usually not what they finally end up selling for...it's usually a whole lot less.... One more thing about eBay.. a lot of sellers don't know or care to know what they are trying to sell... and put fantasy prices on their item... hoping. I have in the way back days have tried both friendly and informative messages to "educate" them as to realistic values and on a few occasions got nice responses and even follow up messages but most often have been told "mind your own f ing business"
~Fred

 

[RIBottleguy]

I've been selling bottles out of a rented space in an antique shop for a number of years now. People here (Rhode Island) absolutely love anything blue like Phillips and Bromos. I usually sell the smaller ones for around $3 and larger ones for $5. And funny story, I dug a dump years ago that had so many Bromos I started to leave them. Once I sold all the ones I kept I realized my mistake and now I take home pretty much every blue bottle!

 

[yacorie]

I’ve been unloading bottles on eBay and the problem is shipping and fees. For those of us without a store, we pay 10% to eBay and an additional 3% to PayPal plus 30 cents per transaction.

eBay charges their fees on the total price, including shipping because people were trying to best them system.

For me, that means that unless a bottle sells for 20 bucks - it’s really not worth the effort. Assume 10 bucks for priority shipping on average and 13% fees - I’m essentially making 8 dollars on a 20 dollar sale. Less if I have to ship further.

It’s easy to tell you to sell locally but that’s not the easiest thing to do either. If you have a source to sell or want to pay To have a space then it might be an option.

I’ve started throwing away bottles that are worth 5-15 bucks each because it’s not worth the effort. Some of them I sell on FB - 5 bucks a bottle plus actual shipping (blobs and hutches) rather than toss them.

 

[Timelypicken]

I’ve been unloading bottles on eBay and the problem is shipping and fees. For those of us without a store, we pay 10% to eBay and an additional 3% to PayPal plus 30 cents per transaction.

eBay charges their fees on the total price, including shipping because people were trying to best them system.

For me, that means that unless a bottle sells for 20 bucks - it’s really not worth the effort. Assume 10 bucks for priority shipping on average and 13% fees - I’m essentially making 8 dollars on a 20 dollar sale. Less if I have to ship further.

It’s easy to tell you to sell locally but that’s not the easiest thing to do either. If you have a source to sell or want to pay To have a space then it might be an option.

I’ve started throwing away bottles that are worth 5-15 bucks each because it’s not worth the effort. Some of them I sell on FB - 5 bucks a bottle plus actual shipping (blobs and hutches) rather than toss them.

Do you ship free shipping or they pay shipping. If you find and sell it for ten dollars eBay takes A little more than a $1 And PayPal takes 50 cents so if you have them pay shipping which will be around $8 dollars You are still making money

 

[yacorie]

Do you ship free shipping or they pay shipping. If you find and sell it for ten dollars eBay takes A little more than a $1 And PayPal takes 50 cents so if you have them pay shipping which will be around $8 dollars You are still making money

Any way you cut it - it needs to sell for 20 bucks for me. If I pay shipping or if they pay shipping, I do both.

People factor the shipping costs, and now taxes, into what they’re willing to pay. You aren’t going to get someone to pay 10 bucks for a $10 bottle and then add tax and shipping on top.

 

[nhpharm]

Note that eBay charges final value fees on the shipping cost as well. A lot of people that just buy on eBay don't realize that, but eBay had to start doing that because people were listing and selling stuff for $0.01 with $20 shipping to get out of paying final value fees to eBay.