Saturday 28 May 2016

Sell


There is a rather hopeless dealer at our Saturday flea-market who I will probably visit today. Occasionally he has something I want, but he has usually paid too much for it himself, so has to sell it for more money than I am willing to pay.

He was complaining a couple of weeks ago that he keeps changing his stock to stuff which he thinks people will want, but then it sits there all day without selling. He just, as he admits, cannot predict what will sell and what will not. I feel the same way about these blog posts.

The main trouble is that he doesn't really know what he is doing - I know the feeling also. I took him an 18th century wine-glass a while ago and he bought it for £50. This was a dead certainty for him, as we both knew he could sell it for about £150, which he did a couple of days later. He pretends that he knows about antique glass, but it is obvious to anyone who knows a little more than him that he does not.

If there is one thing that I hate about charity shops, it is when one of the volunteers puts a printed-out eBay description of an identical item which the shop is selling, and quotes the asking price - not even the sale result - as its true value.

There is a pair of candlesticks which I intend to buy on eBay, and so far they have not attracted much bidding, which is fine by me. A few days ago, someone put up a series of really crappy photos of a single candlestick of the same design. The main photo was on its side - he did not even bother to flip it - and all of the rest were so blurred that you really could not see what was going on.

The pictures were not so blurred that you could not tell that the stick was battered, filthy and covered in old wax though, and the description was appallingly written, ending with the encouraging, 'Go on! Dip your bread!'

I took an immediate dislike to this seller, but was still prepared to bid up to about £40 for this single item. It sold for £80.

Selling things is an art which does not seem to have any particular formula. Some people just can naturally, others cannot. Having said that, I suspect a bit of foul play was going on with this single stick. I hope it backfired on him and he ended up buying his own goods back.

15 comments:

  1. I very much enjoyed the previous post about the house you once lived in and the folks who lived nearby. It's good that you have these strong memories of a particular time and place. Thank you for sharing them with the rest of us. The vintage photograph also tells a story.

    Funny to see today's picture of the resting candlestick and to discover an interesting post about buying and selling. We now have a political candidate who claims to be a champion deal maker. He certainly doesn't impress me. I thought of him when I was reading the last paragraph of today's post.

    Best wishes.

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    1. Oh yes, I forgot about him. Good luck - that wish applies to the whole world.

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  2. I think you are right that selling is an art. A bit of it is acting, too, and storytelling. Not necessarily dishonest, but you need to be able to put a kind of story about the thing over to people, and make them feel they are missing out if they don't join in.

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  3. I think you are right that selling is an art. A bit of it is acting, too, and storytelling. Not necessarily dishonest, but you need to be able to put a kind of story about the thing over to people, and make them feel they are missing out if they don't join in.

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    1. A once in a lifetime opportunity - 3 times so far.

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  4. Catching up with my blog reading. Love the both of them you've posted especially the one about your old house.

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  5. My old antique dealing partner, Justin de Villeneuve, could sell anything to anyone. When he quit me, he sold Twiggy to the world.

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    1. Well he never sold her to me, even at that age. That period of the sixties when the ideal woman was supposed to be completely vacant and unchallenging to men was pretty terrible really. I wanted to be challenged, which is probably why I went out with so many mad women later.

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  6. I like the picture on its side.

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    1. Normally, pictures as crappy as these do not help the sales.

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    2. Normally, pictures as crappy as these do not help the sales.

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    3. Are you half asleep or something? I heard you the first time, over half an hour ago.

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    4. I'm half asleep now, but not when this repeated itself. I told you I was having problems with blogger.

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  7. Well I did buy the other two sticks. My policy is to put about twice as much on a snipe bid as I think they will sell for, and many other people bid them up by about £2 a time. I expected them to sell for about £55, so I put on £111.58. The underbidder expected them to sell for about that too, but not to me. I paid £57 for them. Bargain.

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