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Sell Vintage Board Games on eBay
I
love these one word collectible categories, like ‘Games’, because
that one word often covers a multitude of high profit items, such as
board games, playing card games, computer games, classic board
games, pinball games, and many more. So many categories means
you’ll never run out of games to buy and sell, even if you
specialise within your niche and target such as classic board games
or exclusively wooden items, and also helps you develop a popular
following on eBay as THE place to buy games.
Benefits of specialising in one product type with such plentiful
sub-categories include:
*
You can create an eBay user ID and Shop Name that reflects exactly
what you sell and this helps attract buyers on and off eBay. In
eBay’s Shop pages potential buyers can key in words to describe a
product, in this example ‘Game’ will be commonly used, in which case
all shops stocking games will appear in the return listings, with or
without ‘game’ in their User ID or Shop name. But your details will
also appear every time someone searches shop names with the keyword
‘Game’ if your ID is ‘gamesman’ and your shop name is ‘Game
Seller’. But you’ll be missed out altogether when someone keys
‘Game’ into the shop search box and not the product box where, for
example, your ID is ‘buyfromus’ and your shop name is ‘Get It All
Here’.
*
Potential buyers for one game you list will often check your other
items and, seeing that you specialise in games, they’ll bookmark or
add you to their ‘Favourite Sellers’ list and call back regularly to
view your stock.
*
Every person buying games from you on eBay can be targeted with more
offers outside of eBay, even for products that don’t belong to you.
You can not conspicuously market other people’s products as an
affiliate on eBay but you can promote affiliate products after that
first initial eBay sale. You can do this by email, by attracting
people to your affiliate web site, or by including information about
other people’s products inside the box containing whatever your
customer purchased on eBay. See ‘Games as Back End Sellers’ later
for an easy way to do this without ever creating a web site of your
own and still it will look as though you have thousands of great
products, in this case games, to interest your buyers.
*
Specialising gives stronger buying power at auction and you will
find non-specialists reluctant to buy large bundles of one product
type. There’s another great benefit of specialising at offline
auction sales as opposed to buying across a broad range of items.
Most auctions group ‘like’ items together, such as stamps,
postcards, games, and will sell ‘same item’ lots consecutively
rather than spread similar items throughout the day. Specialising
in one product type means you’ll rarely spend all day in a cold
dingy auction room waiting for your lots to appear, starting number
one at 9 am, lot 54 at
10
am,
lot 371 at
2pm and lots 500 and higher will appear sometime late at night.
This also means part-time eBayers can take a few hours from work,
on flexible working time, for example, to bid on their grouped lots,
instead of sometimes several days to bid on one or two items spread
over multi-day auctions.
As
for price, these recent eBay listings will show how high game
bidders might actually go for something that cost you comparatively
little:
*
A two sided 19th century board game with question and
answer on one side and a fortune telling game on the other, went for
$6750 at an eBay ‘Live’ auction. Live Auctions, on and off the
Internet, often generate far higher prices than traditional 3, 5, 7,
and nine day eBay auctions, so I’ve planned a special article about
Live Auctions for a forthcoming newsletter.
*
A game of ‘Merry Christmas’ manufactured by Parker Bros in 1898 went
for $6,000 and attracted 25 bids.
*
A Santa Claus Marble game, the kind where players skilfully
manoeuvre tiny balls into pre-drilled holes, fetched $1600
*
An early 20th century Wood Ivory MOP Chess Backgammon
Game Table made $862
Notice the use of the acronym, MOP, in the last entry, denoting
Mother of Pearl, which many non-collectors might miss, but all
vintage games collectors will understand. Using ‘MOP’ instead of
‘Mother of Pearl’ saved lots of title space but you must use
acronyms and abbreviations very carefully and only if those terms
are commonly used and understood by potential bidders on your
product type. Check usage by studying present and past auctions for
your product, compare any with abbreviations that ended without bids
against those that fetched record prices. Check out main sellers of
your product type, see if they use particular contractions, you
might generally trust their judgement.
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