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I prefer the seller to have a price listed as well, and generally I do not like to haggle.


Related to swap shop etiquette, it is really obnoxious when you send someone a PM with an offer to buy or trade and your message goes unanswered. Was the offer too low? Is the item in question no longer available? Was the message even received in the first place? The deafening silence is really unnecessary, especially if the lack of response is a result of the recipient not liking the sale or trade terms. Be an adult and respond with "No, thanks" if you don't want to haggle (one of my go-to responses) or provide a counter-offer if you want to explore that option, but not replying at all is rather immature. People that do this often end up on my "do not trade" list as I take their unwillingness to conduct cordial communication as an indicator of how that person will conduct sales and trades.

Ugh. Yes! In general, not responding to PMs is a pain in my ass.

Polonius wrote:

 Ifurita wrote:
Typically, in negotiations the first one to name a price "loses".

I don't think that's necessarily true. In most negotiations, the person that can more easily walk away from the deal will always have the advantage. In the swap shop, that's usually buyers unless the seller has a rare or in demand item.

Stating the price first does "tip the hand" to show what one party feels the goods are worth, but it also sets the parameters for what offers will be seriously considered. If I ask $300 for a lot, I'm letting people know I'm not entertaining offers of $150.

This guy gets it.

I run a successful chain of pawn/secondhand shops and we spend over £1,000,000 a year, I have some experience buying other peoples used stuff.

99.9% of the time a customer that lets us know how much they expect will leave the shop with more money then the customer that asks us to make an opening offer.

Only if that person has done enough research, as Polonius describes, to figure out the "going price" for an item, and then make an offer that is slightly below that.

For most people, they honestly don't mind paying a little bit more to be able to skip that step. "What do you want for it? Sold!"

For me, this is why for standard items on ebay I tend to go for Buy It Now options rather than bidding. Just recently I tried the opposite, and bid on an item only to have it go over the Buy It Now price that another was listed for. Went and bought the Buy It Now item... but in general, I'm willing to pay a few dollars more for the convenience of knowing the asking price. If it's too high, I can always ask if they'll go lower, but at least it gives me a starting point / ballpark figure to know if we should even be communicating.

 filbert wrote:
My own personal preference - I won't deal with people that ask me to make an offer - I can't be bothered with all the tedious back and forth. My view on it; if you are selling something, you state a price that is acceptable to you and if I as the buyer find that price acceptable, then I will pay it. What I don't want to do is spend hours in PM back and forth haggling over it.

This......

I expect a buyer to know what they want for an item...the price also lets me know if they are a seller that I can work something out with or if they have unreasonable expectations for their items. If a seller sends me a "make an offer" message, I always send back "well I will start at $1 then....where are you thinking you want to be at?" Usually results in me being ignored, or cursed at for it.

If you're offering to sell something you should put out a rough price. Asking people make you offers trying to work out what you want for it without insulting or feeling taken advantage of, doesn't seem right. If you're selling, do your research and put a price on it.

I have no problem with someone not listing a price on something if their preference is for trade. HOWEVER, if I PM them and ask what price they would want for it, it just makes my heart sink when they respond with 'make me an offer.' When that happens, there's almost no way both of us are going to win. Either I'm going to offer too low, they get pissed off, and respond with some choice comments about my mother's sexual proclivities, or they accept my offer and I become convinced I just paid too much.

In all my years on Dakka, I've had one-literally one-encounter where the seller asked me to make them an offer work out satisfactorily. The only reason I was even willing to do so was that I had asked him to sell me a single model from an army he had been trying to move as a lot. (And he HAD priced the lot, so asking me to make an offer seemed fair.) Even then, I called in two different professional painters to appraise the model and give me a suggested bid to send the seller, just to satisfy my own piece of mind. For this model? Absolutely worth it. Pro-paint job that just happens to tickle my pickle for personal reasons. But for the overwhelming majority of sales? That would be far too much hassle.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Gratifying, for a change, to find out something that irritates me irritates the majority of my peers as well.

 Mecha_buddha wrote:
Im lazy, if you don't list a price in a sale post in the swap shop, I am less likely to contact the seller.

This. I'm not into playing the haggling game, so if you don't put a baseline down for us to commence a conversation with, I'm not going to contact you (the seller) no matter how awesome what you're selling is.

If someone is selling something, I strongly prefer for them to name a price. "Make offer" pisses me off so it either results in either me dropping the conversation or giving them an insultingly low offer (because they're definitely going to reject it, so they know what you'd be happy with in the first place). The only exception is if the person is already a mate.

 Azazelx wrote:
If someone is selling something, I strongly prefer for them to name a price. "Make offer" pisses me off so it either results in either me dropping the conversation or giving them an insultingly low offer (because they're definitely going to reject it, so they know what you'd be happy with in the first place). The only exception is if the person is already a mate.

Good thing I'm a mate?

Generally, I don't know what things are worth, even in a ballpark sense, so I'll go with roughly eBay numbers (sometimes for hilarious results) and sometimes I'll go with my heart, which tells me to sell my brother's BFG stuff cheap and my own for much, much more.

If I can find it. He turned our parents' garage into a Raiders of the Lost Ark joke.

Yeah, you're lucky there or I'd be throwing angry invective at you as though you were Palladium Books or Raging Heroes!

I'll chime in to support the "whoever makes the post should put out their price" camp. I can also agree with an exception for particularly rare or unusual models that really don't have an established price range such as an old Games Day model or some ancient Ral Partha sculpt unseen since the 1980s. If you're selling something that's available on a retail shelf somewhere, set your price accordingly bearing in mind that retail stores and online vendors offer much higher levels of protection for the buyer so your price will need to offset that risk the buyer is now bearing.

I've been through the swap shop a few times looking for things that have tickled my fancy and every time I find a thread with such a thing it's "Make me an offer"; hence I have no completed Swap Shop transactions. By the time I factor in haggling with such posts, it's often cheaper to just buy it at a FLGS or online and having the advantages of traditional sales (easy returns, customer service from the manufacturer, etc.). I've probably missed out on a few decent deals, but at least I don't have to chew up the Swap Shop Mod's time with transaction reports either.