BST Pricing SHOULD be mandatory.

[steamwhistle]

It would be interesting to hear from any prominent sellers who disagree with the concept of posting prices.

And what if such a member is also a significant supporter of Cybertron.ca? If they do not want to post prices, should their listing be removed at the risk of losing their continued support?

Personally, if I am looking for an item, I won't bother messaging to enquire about the price. If I am selling items, typically I hope to recover my cost for the item, plus shipping, and maybe a slight markup to cover the cost of a beer to compensate for my efforts. Amazingly, I have encountered a number of people who find that unreasonable to the point of being bordering-on-insulting. Oh well.

As I said, it would be interesting to hear from prominent sellers as to their reasoning for omitting prices from their listing... It might just be a matter of taking too much time to review and assess each item. That, in combination with not really having an urgent need to sell items... It's hard to say for sure.

I wish prices were listed, but that's likely because I am more of a potential buyer than a seller.

[JLvatron]

Originally Posted by Leozak

I can see where prices may help but have also seen instances where a seller is attacked because their prices are 'worse than ebay'.

Shouldn't the attacker get banned for flying off the handle?

I thought there's a rule that there's no arguing & discussions allowed in the BST forum; only asking questions like details about the toy conditions, shipping, and generally giving your interest to buy.

[Wheeljack Off]

Originally Posted by kirbenvost

I don't agree with mandatory pricing for a couple reasons. I actually do put pricing on most of my items, however there are a few instances where I don't necessarily agree it should be mandatory.

First, there is no set value for figures. So what's fair? I tend to undervalue my items because I know it's the only way I can get rid of some of them. But does that mean I get what my items are actually worth? Not usually. If a person accepts reasonable offers they may be actually getting what the item is worth from a buyer who actually wants it. If they're forced to show prices from the outset, they'll either price it at what it's worth and buyers will go look elsewhere for the cheapest deal, or they price it too low and end up at a loss.

That doesn't really make sense to me.
That seems like a pretty big leap.
If you price the figure at what you want to sell it for, there is no mystery. You will sell if for what you want, or you wont. Having a set price doesnt negate offers...

Originally Posted by kirbenvost

For trades, some figures of the same size class are simply worth more on the secondary market. If people are forced to put a price next to their items they will only look at the value versus what the figure actually is. For example, no one's going to trade a Generations Voyager for a Bayverse Voyager if say the Generations one is worth $25 and you can't get rid of the Bayverse for $15. However if it's a straight trade going by the size of the figure with no pricing involved, they might be more willing if they're trading a figure they don't want for one they do want.

Again, this is off as far as I'm concerned.
How is posting or not posting a price going to affect what 2 people in a trade value a figure at?

If someone wants to do the trade, they will.
Regardless of market or secondary market, a trade is based on what two people value 2 different figures at.

Originally Posted by kirbenvost

Sometimes, the value is hard to determine. eBay is not the best resource for price references, nor are online retailers. When I was selling my Maketoys Giant I went by what eBay was offering as market price, when it turned out the re-release was just around the corner for much less, so I had to adjust my price to that. So it's sometimes a tough call to say what pricing should be. Pricing is usually not set in stone either, because many offer deals for buying multiples, etc.

It's what the figure is worth TO YOU.
You know how much you paid, you can browse Ebay sold listings for reference but at the end of the day, it's based on how much your buyer wants to pay and how much you value the figure at. Thats all.

Originally Posted by kirbenvost

That said, I do agree that it's sometimes a waste of time to have to message about a figure, only to find out it's priced higher than you're willing to pay. But it also takes a lot of time to price out every figure if you're selling a lot of stuff. If a buyer is truly interested, they will ask, and that's when the seller can take the time to price the item. But if they don't want to do that, they can have the prices set out in the first place.

I doubt it takes more time for a seller to post prices than it will to go back and forth, back and forth with a potential buyer just trying to get a line on a price, let alone completing a transaction.

Originally Posted by kirbenvost

So I dunno. I see both sides of the issue for sure but I probably lean more towards not having it be mandatory. Encouraged, but not mandatory.

[Leozak]

Originally Posted by JLvatron

Shouldn't the attacker get banned for flying off the handle?

I thought there's a rule that there's no arguing & discussions allowed in the BST forum; only asking questions like details about the toy conditions, shipping, and generally giving your interest to buy.

It did not happen on cybertron.ca

[Shepp]

I should get around to actually organizing and sorting out my for sale thread, and adding some quick prices.

While I don't agree that there should be mandatory prices, I really should get my act together and pop in some information to help those actually looking for stuff.

I would put like $10 for complete deluxe, $5 for scout/command, $15 for voyager. I mean, I'd consider that reasonable, plus shipping. Made things easier with the blanket pricing.

They tend to sit forever, though. It's the shipping that kills it in Canada. A $10 deluxe becomes like $25 after shipping.

Plus I'd always get people asking for like half-off regardless of what I would put as the price.

So I just removed the prices and then sort of.... forgot about it. Things got a bit hectic and I ended up procrastinating.

I've got some VV hauls I need to organize and piece back together, and then update my list with prices.

[Robimus]

My take,

People should be able to run their business affairs here how they see fit in terms of posting or not posting a price. To me it is no ones business but the seller.

[Goaliebot]

Originally Posted by Wheeljack Off

Why so loathe to advocate a rule enforcing it?

We have so many other rules here, this one actually makes sense.

I think making it a rule brings in issues of enforcement and might reduce the number of sellers. It's easier for me to ignore the no-price sellers than it would be for the mods to enforce/explain the rules over and over. And while I consider PMing a no-price seller to be basically a hail Mary play (as I assume no-price sellers are trying to get above market price), I'd rather have that option than not have it. Because I suspect the no-price sellers would mostly choose not to sell here rather than post prices.

Just my 2 cents.

What I would love to see, but I recognize its a technical feature the forum software simply doesn't have, would be an ability to tag threads in a way visible in the forum view:

Private Tags: This would let me personally tag threads - I could add a tag only I can see. So I could check a thread, mark it "no prices" and not bother checking it again.

Public tags: only the seller could add these, and they could mark threads as "new items added (date)", letting me know to check it out again.

Aside from these thread level tags, it would be great to have a code tag of "[SOLD]" for text in the body of a thread, so that sellers can mark items with it and those items no longer come up in a search. This would end the frustration of searching for a figure only to find threads listing it as sold. Maybe implement another set of code tags for [FORSALE] and [WANTED] and then in a search you can tick boxes for "exclude sold" and/or "exclude wanted".

[Autobotz24]

In my car club we had this same problem with people not posting prices and users getting flamed for high prices. What we did was made it mandatory for prices to be shown and only the user that started the thread can make posts. If someone had a question they would have to use PMs.
Also, a minimum of 10 useful posts would have to be made by users before they got access to the buy & sell section. This was to prevent trolls and random people from selling useless crap

[Batman]

No.

People should be free to run their sales threads as they please. If someone doesn't like how someone conducts business, then just move on and buy from someone else.

Personally I list prices and will avoid sellers who don't, but I am not about to tell them how to sell just like I am not going to tell people what to buy.

[sarmick01]

You know there could be such a thing as the seller doesn't know what they want/what the item is actually worth. Maybe they're hoping someone would offer them a fair price. You never know.