sellinghelp newbie

[GoktimusPrime]

Selling toys is usually a pain in the butt. There's even an entire thread dedicated to talking about how hard it is to sell Transformers. I think ultimately you need to ask yourself how desperately you want to offload these toys. If you want to sell them sooner rather than later, then you might need to consider slashing your prices. If this is not acceptable to you then you may need to accept the fact that it may take a veeeeeery long time - months or maybe over a year - to sell your toys.

It's no different from how retailers sell toys. Those like Toys R Us who sell toys at high prices end up sitting on their stock for months or years. Otherwise like Big W or Kmart who tend to have lower prices, are more likely to sell their toys faster. Premium Collectables often sells out their pre-orders because their prices are so good.

Put yourself in a buyer's shoes and think about how much you would be able willing to pay for these toys. Comparing your prices with rip off merchants like eBay doesn't really help... that's like trying to sell an MP Tracks for $150 and saying that it's on par with Toys R Us' RRP. I sold an MP Tracks for $65 and it still took me 9 months to finally offload it! You've only had your sales thread up for 12 hours, dude. Be patient.

Perhaps you could add a link to your sales thread on your board signature so that people can see it on all of your posts (as I have done on mine ). Because I know that I don't often look in the sales section, so seeing something advertised on a signature is more likely to draw my attention.

[Ode to a Grasshopper]

Yeah...I'd be pretty surprised if you managed to get anywhere near $600 for FP Intimidator. Your average specialty webstore has it listed (albeit unavailable) for ~$450, tops. Other 3P combiners tend to be roughly the same, give or take $100.

Basically, as a general rule TFs don't age well value-wise, 3P included. On top of that, there's a popular line out atm, so people are spending on currently available TFs. That means less spare funds for older TFs. You're better off selling during 'dry spells', so to speak.

In the case of Intimidator in particular, it's not an especially sought-after piece, nor particularly rare (i.e. most people that really wanted it already have it), it's old but not 'vintage 3P' old (eg. you could probably sell the FansProject Classics Cliffjumper upgrade kit for a lot), there's another 3P not-Stunticons set on the way, and there's been not one but two official HasTak versions (Combiner Wars/Unite Warriors and the G2 version) released only a year or two ago.

If you're keen to sell, you'll need to drop that asking price. I don't remember exactly 'cos it's not a set that interests me much, but most of the ones I've seen move have been around the $350 mark. And even then, it'll depend on if someone has an interest in it or not.

[defenderoz]

thanks for the advice guys. good stuff. appreciate it. definitely a help

[UltraMarginal]

The other thing to consider is that a lot of people here are harcore collectors and have a considerable collection, they may have looked at your sales thread and not found anything they want that they don't already have, I know I do this often.
unless your prices are excellent value, selling toys takes time and it's a pain in the ass.

[GoktimusPrime]

^This is a very good point. This is also why many of us who regularly attend(ed) events like collectable toy fairs usually came home empty handed because it was very rare to ever find something that we wanted to buy. I personally enjoyed attending such fairs simply for the social aspect of hanging out with fellow collectors, but often we never bought anything.

Most of us here have a "Just take my money!" mentality when we see a toy that we want, which means that we will usually just purchase the toys we want as soon as we find them in shops, or even pre-order them online to assure that we don't miss out. Consequently we rarely find the need to purchase toys off the secondary market (which has the added bonus of being usually cheaper too ).

The 'holes' in my collection tend to just be "odd" holes rather than toys that I deeply desire. Basically, any toy that I really want to own will have been purchased ASAP (or pre-ordered), which means that anything left over are lower priority figures. This means that I am unwilling to pay marked up prices for these toys because they're not that important to me.

For example: Generations Rattrap
I skipped this toy because it didn't really interest me enough to go and want to buy one. If someone were to sell a Generations Rattrap at $30 or more, there's no way that I would be interested in buying it. Since I was never interested in pre-ordering Rattrap online for $25~30 around the time that it came out, I sure as hell would not be willing to pay this price again from a private seller. If someone were to sell a loose Generations Rattrap for say $10~15 then I miiight think about it... maaaybe. If I saw it for that price at a toy fair then I probably buy it on impulse. But otherwise I'd be likely to just pass up on this toy... again.

So this is the thing to bear in mind when selling old toys -- you're selling toys which people have already passed up. This means that there's little (if any) incentive to purchase it now. Adding higher prices to the toys only adds to further decrease that incentive. Bear in mind that many of us here have been furiously collecting Transformers since the 1980s.