Antique Sales on eBay: Terrible Downtrends Continue in 2016

eBay Antiques: a dead market in 2016/17?

It’s been about 2 years since I last wrote on this topic and I thought I’d share some progress since then.

The context

For starters, let’s give it some, I hope, credibility. Who am I and what real knowledge do I have on this topic?

Well, I’ve been selling antiques (mostly watches, clocks, silver, and some military items) on eBay since 2004. In total, that’s about 12-13 years, so I know what I’m talking about.

That’s why when I say that eBay has been pretty much dead as a sales channel since about 2013/4, I’m speaking knowingly.

Who is this for?

Why do I bother? That’s simple because my target audience consists of two broad categories of readers:

• buyers/collectors, who wonder where all the ‘open bidding’ offers on eBay antiques have gone and

• new antique dealers who have a passion for old things and think they can combine that with making a profit.

In this article, my messages to both parties will not be warm and welcoming, but rather stark statements of fact. Care!

today’s reality

It’s almost impossible to get accurate statistics on this subject, but I’ve seen some sources globally suggest that only about 1 in 6 old eBay listings actually result in a sale. Most of them are of the cheap and cheerful variety consisting of items (of any gender) priced under 50 ($/£/Euro). For anything of higher quality and therefore value, the figure is likely to be MUCH lower.

Generally speaking, if you offer an item for sale at a fixed price (or the minimum starting bid level), it almost certainly won’t sell. If you start an open bid at a low price and expect to get “one result” then 90% of the time you will be disappointed and lose.

An exaggeration?

Well, take this as an example. I recently experimented with an open zero bid on a late 19th century French bronze piece (an urn) in the art nouveau style. It was about 15 cm high and a very beautiful thing. It was sold for 0.50p – yes, you saw that correctly, 0.50p!

New Dealers – BEWARE

For distributors, this kind of thing is a catastrophe.

You can keep advertising all you want and help make eBay even richer, but generally speaking, unless you reduce your prices to loss-making levels, you won’t sell anything. If you advertise at a fixed price or realistic starting prices, your ad will be ignored.

Now I know that there are always some exceptions. Sometimes a piece will work just fine, but they are the rarity. I speak to hundreds of distributors in many countries and the message is the same”eBay is a disaster for quality item sales“.

So, remember the next time you see one of those antiquities TV shows where people make a lot of money: chances are it’s staged and some of the appraisals of ‘found’ items during the hunting are totally ridiculous. Most of what you buy for sale will either get stuck or end up selling at a loss.

*** TOP TIPS WARNING FOR NEW DEALERS ***. One of the most common things I see now are novice traders walking through markets and estate clearance sales with the dreaded smartphone in hand. Time and time again, I hear them looking at an item and then frantically searching for it on eBay and excitedly proclaiming to the person with them “look, people are asking XYZ amount for these on eBay, so this price here must be cheap”. Just yesterday I saw that happen no less than four times at a huge estate sale.

WRONG! There is a BIG difference between the prices people see when ordering an item on eBay and the actual value of the item to a professional. Some people on eBay ask for amounts that are almost 100% higher than the ACTUAL SALE value of the item. They have no chance of selling their items for anything remotely close to what they are asking.

Remember as a professional that you need to base your idea of ​​how much you want to buy an item for with the idea of ​​reselling it, based on what you have seen other SOLD in a retail environment like eBay and then pay maybe 75% less than that to have room for taxes, expenses and profit margins, etc.

Antique buyers and lovers

Now there is or should be a healthy lesson here for you too.

For every dealer I talk to who complains about eBay, I probably talk to 3 collectors/buyers who complain that good antiques can no longer be found on the forum, or more correctly, not at reasonable prices.

Now here’s the puzzle: what do you mean by “reasonable prices”? Right now, too many buyers take that to mean “almost nothing.” So they don’t bid, buy, or make offers, but rather wait in the hope that sellers will get desperate to list their products at an open bid of zero, at which point they’ll get what they want for next to nothing.

Fair enough in a sense, but keep in mind that this attitude has helped to virtually eliminate eBay as a viable conduit for the antiques trade. If you think the price isn’t too bad, buy it! Don’t get paralyzed by indecision and end up doing nothing hoping to see it again soon at a lower price.

If you stick with your current behavior, selling antiques online in an open bidding context will be a thing of the past. You’ll be back to the expensive High Street antique shops with great prices or the same thing online. It’s the buyers that are killing eBay right now, so if you’re one, don’t complain about their demise!

general market forces

One last contributing factor that should be considered.

It’s indisputable that people just aren’t buying antiques, of any genre, like they were before 2008 and possibly even as late as 2013. All of a sudden, the market is just gone. There are strange ‘hot spots’ like Chinese art that can flare up for a few months before disappearing, but for the most part, people just aren’t interested in buying.

That is, of course, hitting eBay hard.

This is not unique. Fashions come and go and while everyone suddenly wants (for example, poor quality “Scandinavian style” flat furniture, albeit with clean design lines, then the antique dealers specializing in solid wood furniture of the past will have a great success. .

These things go in cycles and have been seen before. This “antiques are boring” cycle may last longer than similar ones I’ve seen in the past, but it’s coming back.

When you do, you can help get things back on eBay, assuming there are any viable markets for eBay antiques left to pick up!