Do people go elsewhere than eBay for old toys/comics these days?

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Auntie Slag
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Do people go elsewhere than eBay for old toys/comics these days?

Post by Auntie Slag »

I haven’t looked at eBay since the mid 2000’s when I went to Gumtree and bought things locally. Yesterday I went onto eBay again and looked at prices. There are plenty of comics from the early IDW and some Dreamwave era going for seemingly decent prices, with no ripoff P&P and from sellers with good scores, yet hardly anything is being bid on. It was a similar story when I looked at a few G1 toys; very few actual bids.

And then on the other side of the coin I saw Issue 113 of the Marvel G1 comic sell for £151.

Have all the real TF aficianados left eBay, is there a better place to look these when it comes to sourcing old, original G1 stuff?
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Denyer
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Re: Do people go elsewhere than eBay for old toys/comics these days?

Post by Denyer »

I think with DW and IDW it's just that there's no market. Anyone who wanted them got at the time, and singles in particular are worthless. I charity shopped most of mine years ago and picked up the few volumes I wanted as TPBs.

The same's probably true to a lesser extent with loose and incomplete or damaged figures -- great if you want eg a robot mode only Horri-Bull and are patient. Complete examples seem to sell well and sealed or graded examples fetch a premium but you can pick up eg some older 3P pieces at competitive prices off people trading in (and some that haven't been replaced in want lists have soared in price). The good quality G1 KOs still seem to be around. Certain lines like CW are scarcer even though there are KOs.

Don't forget that the movies caused a bubble too.
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Re: Do people go elsewhere than eBay for old toys/comics these days?

Post by Warcry »

There certainly seems to be less competition for old toys on eBay these days. I've recently seen a few items, thought about buying them and then gotten distracted and forgotten all about it. Then I've gone back to eBay weeks or months later and the listings are still there. Auction listings seem to be a lot more scarce nowadays, which I think is part of it. Sellers (who mostly seem to be professional dealers nowadays) just set stuff up as Buy-it-Now and don't seem to care if it takes six months to shift it. But I think that suits most buyers too...I know I would definitely rather buy something for a fixed price right then and there (if I think it's a fair price) rather than have to worry about getting into a bidding war and maybe buying the toy a week later (or maybe getting sniped by someone at the last minute). There's definitely exceptions but the pace of the market seems to be a lot more relaxed than it was a decade ago.

On top of that, I don't think anyone cares about vintage Transformers comics anymore other than the people that already have them. It's just not a very popular medium these days. The industry has been dying a slow death for ages, continuously alienating old fans while completely failing to attract enough new ones.
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Denyer
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Re: Do people go elsewhere than eBay for old toys/comics these days?

Post by Denyer »

IIRC, and it might have been from before eBay changed feedback to promote customer fraud and I wound down selling, they stopped charging to renew buy it now listings -- so there's an incentive to leave them up long-term and just let potential buyers make offers on things. Have also noticed that they more recently added functionality that lets sellers contact watchers, so that if you watch listings you often get direct offers from sellers looking for a quick sale. Works quite well, but does mean there's less traditional bidding behaviour visible.
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Re: Do people go elsewhere than eBay for old toys/comics these days?

Post by Skyquake87 »

I still use eBay :) I used to do listings, but since moving and needing to sell stuff relatively quickly for space, I've just listed as BINs with Best Offers. I've found it works well for TFs, action figures and licensed Lego sets. Less popular stuff (books, comics, etc) has just sat around. I've done the offer to watchers thing, but I've probably had about at 30% success rate with that - people don't seem to want try counter-offers or 'owt. I do odd auction style listings now and again, but find when I do those I just get people going ' do you have a BIN?'. To which the answer is always 'No. That's why it's an auction.'.
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Re: Do people go elsewhere than eBay for old toys/comics these days?

Post by MIRV888 »

I banged my whole collection on auction in the last 2 weeks. It went great. To be clear, it was a whole bunch of G1 Decepticons in great shape. They brought great money and people actually bid on stuff they wanted. The main issue I had was BS accounts bidding with no intention of paying using alts & new accounts.
I have never seen that in an auction before ever.
I clocked my Star Wars Legos without a single fake bid.
Ebay is a strange place.
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Auntie Slag
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Re: Do people go elsewhere than eBay for old toys/comics these days?

Post by Auntie Slag »

Yeah, I had a go too. Put a couple of figures on to test the waters and only managed to get the offer price, and that was after they'd been re-auctioned a few times. Oh well. Yours must've been in much better shape than mine! :)
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Re: Do people go elsewhere than eBay for old toys/comics these days?

Post by Cyberstrike nTo »

My biggest problem with eBay is that the stuff I would buy from them isn't high value items like I bought 3 comics from the 90s on there for a penny with $4.00 S&H. I felt so weird that that of paying the seller for a penny for 3 books and I actually thought of sending $1.00 for those 3 comics because that was what they were (and probably still are) worth. I spent the better part of 20 years trying to get a complete set of Jim Starlin's masterpiece Dreadstar the comics were easy to find the prelude in the first nine issues and #15 of Marvel's Epic Illustrated magazine were the real challenge and in the end I found the last issues of them at LCS when I wasn't even looking for them. The only thing related to Dreadstar that I bought of eBay was a promotional poster for a few bucks.

I think a lot of the most popular and important comics from the 80s and 90s aren't worth as much as some fans think that they are, some of it is because of the rise and popularity of TPBs and HCs that make books like Watchmen, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Crisis on Infinite Earths, and Secret Wars so easy to find that even the original first printings of the single issues are probably worth less because I have like 2 hardcover collections of TDKR and COIE and a beaten up TPBs of Watchmen and Secret Wars and if I need to get a new edition neither one is hard to find or hard to get. The same with The Transformers comics from Marvel US and UK.
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