// July 7th, 2008 // 2 Comments » // Brad's Life, Photography, eBay
Just a random thought that’s been swirling in my head for about a month now. We (the consumer) now control the market price of used items. And at the same time, we get disgruntled at the deflation of value of products (I’m speaking mainly electronics, here).
So here’s a scenario:
A Nikon D300 sells for $1799.00 on Amazon, the MSRP (body only, no lens). At the time, a good deal on a used D300 would run you in the range of $1650. I got mine, new, for $1600. You know how I roll.
Then, Nikon unveils the Nikon D700, with an entry price of $3000. Amazon drops their price of the D300 to $1636. From here, the consumer changes the market of the used D300.
And in the age of the internet, all it takes is one person.
Usually, this one person has unlimited discretionary income to switch to new products at their leisure. So they just need to drop off the D300 at a fair price and then move up to the D700.
So they head to the Buy/Sell forums, and list it for $999. The camera QUICKLY sells, and the post is forever etched in the minds of people who were searching for a D300 and saw the great price. It’s also archived on the forum for all to see. Now people who are listing their D300 for reasonable prices of $1300-1400 aren’t able to sell them, because people want the seller to move closer to that magical $999 mark.
Is a price of $1300 (a 23% decrease in value in 2 months) not good enough? Does the camera still not have the exact same features, take the same great pictures, and have the same quality as it did the week before the D700 was announced? If the sellers wait long enough, will buyers eventually move back towards a more reasonable price of $13-1400?
I tell ya, early adoption can be an expensive thing. By the time I sell my D300, they’ll probably have a D2000, and my camera will sell for $74.99 on eBay. I
Another area where this can play is used books. Last night we listed 25+ books on Amazon. Most of them were listed for $0.01. How do you even compete with that? We decided to donate them instead.
Then there were books running in the $4.00 range. We listed them for $3.50, and 6 books sold overnight.
Have we created a new price point for that book? Not unless someone else listed the book after us and used that as the new price. With Amazon, once the book is purchased, the listing is gone. No archive. So for someone coming to buy the book after ours sold, $4.00 is the low price.
It all comes down to what price someone wants, and what price someone wants to pay. But with the internet, there are many more people in the game. It’s not the local flea market anymore. It’s all demographics, all socio-economic statuses, all hiding behind a generic username. When I sold my Nikon D80, someone messaged me and said they were a college student who wanted to get into photography more, and only had $xxx.xx to spend. It was about $75 less than my asking price. I thought back to my college days, and all the people who had helped me get started in photography. Letting me borrow lenses, giving me good prices on used equipment, etc. So I decided to sell it to the person for the price they asked.
Could this have just been someone making 6-digits who did not want to spend that much on a camera to take photos of their kids’ soccer games? Possibly. Of course, I cross-checked their name on Google and found a student photographer website, and saw their photo on Facebook listed at a college near their shipping address. But not everyone would do that. The anonymity of the internet… it’s an interesting thing.
I am an 
