eBay Antique Sales: Terrible Downward Trends Continue in 2016
eBay Antiques: a dead market in 2016/17?
It’s been about 2 years since I last wrote about 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 (mainly watches, clocks, silver, and some military items) on eBay since 2004. All told, 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, wondering where all the eBay antique ‘open bid’ deals have gone and
- New antique dealers who have a passion for old things and believe they can combine that with making a profit.
In this article, my messages to both parties will not be warm and welcoming, but rather harsh statements of fact. Watch out!
today’s reality
It’s almost impossible to get accurate statistics on this, but I’ve seen some sources globally suggest that only about 1 in 6 old eBay listings actually results in a sale. Most of them are of the cheap and cheerful variety consisting of objects (of any genre) 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 at 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 “a result”, then 90% of the time you will be disappointed and lose.
An exaggeration?
Well, take this as an example. Recently, I experimented with an open scratch offer on a late 19th century French bronze piece (an urn) in the art nouveau style. It was about 15 cm tall and it was a very beautiful thing. Sold for 0.50 pence – yes, you saw that correctly, 0.50 pence!
New distributors – 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 lower 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 talk to hundreds of distributors in many countries and the message is the same “eBay is a disaster for sales of quality items“.
So, remember the next time you watch one of those antique TV shows where people make a lot of money: it’s most likely going to be staged and some of the appraisals of ‘found’ items during the hunt are totally ridiculous. Most of what you buy for sale will either stall or end up selling at a loss.
*** TOP TIPS WARNING FOR NEW DISTRIBUTORS ***. One of the most common things I see now is novice traders walking through markets and estate clearance sales with the dreaded smartphone in hand. Over and over again, I hear them look at an item and then frantically search for it on eBay and excitedly proclaim to the person with them “look, people are asking XYZ for these on eBay, so this price here must be cheap”. Just yesterday I saw that happen no less than four times at a big estate sale.
WRONG! There is a BIG difference between the prices that people who order an item on eBay see 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 their asking price.
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 others 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.
Buyers and lovers of antiques
Now there is or should be a healthy lesson here for you too.
For every dealer I talk to who complains about eBay, I talk to probably 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 offer, but wait in the hope that sellers will get desperate to advertise their wares in an open bid of zero, at which point they’ll get what they want for next to nothing.
It’s fair in a sense, but keep in mind that this attitude has helped virtually eliminate eBay as a viable conduit for the antiques trade. If you think the price is not so bad, buy it! Don’t be paralyzed by indecision and end up doing nothing in the hope of seeing it again soon at a lower price.
If you maintain your current behaviour, selling antiques online in an open bidding context will be a thing of the past. You will go back to the expensive High Street antique shops with great prices or the same 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 is indisputable that people are simply not buying antiques, of any kind, as they were prior to 2008 and possibly even as late as 2013. Suddenly the market is simply gone. There are rare ‘hot spots’ like Chinese art that can flare up for a few months before disappearing, but in general, people just aren’t interested in buying.
That is, of course, hitting eBay hard.
This is not unique. Fashions come and go and as long as everyone suddenly wants (eg 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 great success .
These things go in cycles and have been seen before. This “antique is boring” cycle may last longer than similar ones I’ve seen in the past, but it will come back.
When you do, you can help things on eBay get back on their feet, assuming there are any viable eBay antique markets left to pick up!