Ebay driving prices down?

[2DeltaFoxtrot]

Yesterday, I was talking with a friend about things we collect. His collecting passion is antique fishing tackle and leans heavy to old lures. He said he's been collecting for over 30+ years and found that Ebay has really driven the prices down on his collection. When I asked him to explain, he said that "back in the day" you had to physically go to shows where collectors displayed their lures and at any given show you would only see a few examples of a particular item. With the advent of Ebay, everyone seemed to get in on selling their old tackle driving the price down on his collection.

While I realize watches are slightly different in some respects do you all feel the same about this?

[Eeeb]

I was a big eBayer long before I was a watch collector so I don't have any direct experience on eBay's effect in watches... but, eBay has certainly had a strong effect on the vintage car market. (Yes, people actually buy cars off of eBay -- I've done 8 to 10 over the years.)

If you had a car that was not common, you could set your price and put in a few adverts in national publications and wait for the fish, er, I mean buyers, to swim up ;-)

You can try that now but the market is far more liquid ... potential buyers see the same car listed by a joker in Joplin or a nut in Nantucket and they swim elsewhere if they don't like your price.

Specifically what I noticed on eBay was at the very beginning it drove prices up... there were far more buyers than sellers of hard to find stuff... But as sellers realized the potential of eBay, more listed and prices went down.

[pacifichrono]

I've been buying and selling a lot of vintage watches on eBay for 2-3 years. I've noticed in the last six months that prices seem to be rising. I'm not winning nearly as many auctions using the same bidding/pricing approach. I'm in awe of how much some watches are now selling for versus a year ago. I should be moving up with the market, since I'm selling most of what I buy, but I'm chicken! :-d

[Eeeb]

I attribute part of this to the dramatic decline of the Bush dollar... watches are truly a world market.

[Ray MacDonald]

I've bought some vintage watches on eBay and I always thought they were fairly priced - if you sniped and didn't get into bidding wars. Of course the price you pay is usually doubled at least when you add in the cost of a service/new parts for your latest "eBay folly."
The big thing on eBay is the variety of items you can find - much more efficient than trolling antique shops in my view. Also it's a pretty efficient market - discontinuities in pricing get ironed out pretty fast when overpriced items don't sell.
As a Canadian I have experienced a 35% reduction in pricing over the past few years so that also makes me happy.

[MrRoundel]

I bought and sold (Mostly bought) pocket watches on Ebay starting in 1997. I agree that in the beginning, prices trended up, especially on items that were perceived to be relatively rare or beautiful. I suspect that there were fresh batches of buyers who were constantly being introduced to the huge world market that Ebay gave them access to. Perhaps they'd been looking for an item for many years, going to all sorts of auctions, flea markets, etc., but to no avail. Lo and behold, there it is on Ebay. More than likely there were similar bidders with similar desires discovering Ebay concurrently. This served to run up prices. Today, many of these buyer batches have been used up, having found what they'd been looking for. In addition, I don't believe that Ebay's growth of new users is anywhere near what it used to be, therefore the buyer market for specific items is shrinking. As the prices to more common watches suffer, the professional watch person has to be more careful in the watches he/she buys for resale. As someone above mentioned, there is still money being made, but I believe much more of that profit margin is dependent on being faster on the buy trigger and more savvy regarding marketability. There's that old saying in collecting that states, "buy the best you can afford." I believe that this has been shown to be true in watch collecting of late. The rare stuff, and of course the 14-18K cased stuff, has gone up, where the common stuff has suffered. It's a good time to start a collection. Certainly, times are better today than they were a few years ago for the beginning collector. This brings up another more macro concern I have. I wonder just how much of the mechanical watch collecting interest had its genesis in a fascination in things mechanical, like cars, etc. With fewer kids working on their cars today than used to be the case, and much of their lives revolving around computer games rather than machines, where will the new interest come from? But, I guess that might be a subject for another discussion someday. Cheers.

[pz93c]

Maybe.

Everything seems to be going down, except whatever I'm bidding on. ;-)

Buy high, sell low seems to be my motto.|>

[bjohnson]

I want to do business with you.

[bjohnson]

If the US dollar ever recovers, my ebay buying days are going to be severely dampened.

That would outweigh even a 25% variance (up or down) on the cost of watches

[2DeltaFoxtrot]

While I see a decent variety of watches on Ebay, I also see people getting some crazy money for watches (especially divers) that would normally go for a hundred plus dollars less at a brick n mortar store. I think at any one time, I have about ten to fifteen watches that I'm watching just to see what the final purchase price is.

You can get some great deals on manual winds, quartz watches are generally overpriced, automatics depending on movement appear to be on the money mostly.

[Ray MacDonald]

Are you following mostly vintage or new stuff as well?

[Eeeb]

While I see a decent variety of watches on Ebay, I also see people getting some crazy money for watches (especially divers) that would normally go for a hundred plus dollars less at a brick n mortar store. I think at any one time, I have about ten to fifteen watches that I'm watching just to see what the final purchase price is.

You can get some great deals on manual winds, quartz watches are generally overpriced, automatics depending on movement appear to be on the money mostly.

All the lemmings are wearing divers so there is lots of demand...

Winders are always low priced... often I pay more to have them COA'ed than to buy them.

I find the good quartz is grossly under priced; that's an opinion. The market decides, not me, what is over and under priced.

The same technology watch in a 'name' brand like Rolex or Omega will go for a lot more than if found in a Longines or Candino... but that's always been true for the watch market and eBay doesn't effect that.

[pacifichrono]

This week I was tracking a square-ish Hamilton electric from the '60s in gold fill. It sold for over $800. o|

[Eeeb]

This week I was tracking a square-ish Hamilton electric from the '60s in gold fill. It sold for over $800. o|

For me it was the opposite... I got a watch for just over $200 that I would have paid over $1000 for if the bidding had gone there... ;-) ... it would have been my most expensive watch if others had valued it as much as me ... but they didn't. :-s

[pacifichrono]

For me it was the opposite... I got a watch for just over $200 that I would have paid over $1000 for if the bidding had gone there... ;-) ... it would have been my most expensive watch if others had valued it as much as me ... but they didn't. :-sGot a picture???

[Eeeb]

Got a picture???

I don't have the watch yet... will post when it arrives. If it is as advertised, it will be the only ETA 206.211 equipped watch I have ever seen... Hopefully it is. But you never know for sure until the watch is in your hands.

[Ray MacDonald]

I've always adopted the "Wee Willie Keeler" approach to eBay bidding on watches. "Hit 'em where they ain't."
In pocket watches everybody wants railroad grade or fancy hunter cased models. I stick to 17 jewel open face watches. Good quality and lots still around = lower bids.
The smaller 1940s wind-ups are not as desirable as the autos from the 1950s and 1960s - although women are taking more of an interest in them nowadays. Often you can buy a nice Elgin or even a Hamilton for what it costs to service them.
I try to concentrate on the sort of watches my grandfather and father would have had. They were lunch pail types and wouldn't have been walking around wearing a Patek or Vacheron.

[Eeeb]

I've always adopted the "Wee Willie Keeler" approach to eBay bidding on watches. "Hit 'em where they ain't."
In pocket watches everybody wants railroad grade or fancy hunter cased models. I stick to 17 jewel open face watches. Good quality and lots still around = lower bids.
The smaller 1940s wind-ups are not as desirable as the autos from the 1950s and 1960s - although women are taking more of an interest in them nowadays. Often you can buy a nice Elgin or even a Hamilton for what it costs to service them.
I try to concentrate on the sort of watches my grandfather and father would have had. They were lunch pail types and wouldn't have been walking around wearing a Patek or Vacheron.

Excellent strategy for building a good collection without breaking the bank.

I am just stunned at how low 30's and 40's tanq watches are going for... They represent what may be the acme of US production but often go for LESS than the cost of service.

I have a personal bias against collecting watches you can't wear and have to keep in a safe. And, let's be honest, when it comes to the movement, Pateks may be nice but often Hamiltons are often just as nice... and Hamiltons can be serviced for less than a month's pay.... far less |>

[JohnF]

Hi -

As with all things that are priced, the law of supply and demand can be ignored only at the peril of your mortal soul. :-)

Seriously, I've been buying watches on eBay for more than 4 years now.

The supply of vintage watches is per definition limited: there are fewer and fewer of them around each and every year. This is true of the very high end, but less so with the lower end of the spectrum: there remain a very large number of what my watchmaker calls "ticking parts collections" that are sold and bought each and every day. These are invariably the watches in really bad shape, of unknown heritage, of obscure brands and manufacturers, of dubious parentage, and which are, generally speaking, not "really" worth the time and effort for a serious collector (been there, done that: I've got probably 20 such watches when I first started collecting...).

That said, eBay is a world-wide clearing house - I recently bought watches in Australia, Hungary, Germany, Austria, the UK and the US - and this means that, generally speaking, it offers the greatest supply of vintage watches.

This puts downward pressure on overall watch prices, since the supply of buyers is also limited. Since the beginning of the year, I've spent over $1600 on watches or watch parts, and I can't afford to do that on a constant basis without having some really severe marital problems.

Hence the number of buyers is fairly limited. This also tends to reduce prices.

That said, the number of rare and unusual, highly collectible watches is fairly limited. The number of watches out there is much, much larger than the number of watches available of eBay, and the rare and unusual ones are only a small number of those; those who want to sell them are even smaller. This would tend to increase prices as well. In addition, watches undergo fashion trends: at a partner company where I work, one fellow bought himself an Omega, resulting in several of his colleagues also upgrading their watches (several to Omega as well, but one to Glashütte Original and another, who spends a fair amount of time in Japan, to a rather nice Spring Drive). If such watches are acquired via eBay, increased demand will drive prices up as well.

Like I said, it's a function of supply and demand, and watches are too heterogeneous a market to make a blanket statement.

Further, consider the fact that eBay is a world market: one of my recent acquisitions I was able to get because of the weakness of the dollar. A watch that sells for $120 really only costs me €80 because of the exchange rate, and I've impulse-bought two watches at that price point here on WUS (both Seikos) since that is a price that will generally come through customs without the hassle of paying duties and import taxes (the latter is 19%, which is a great incentive to meet that price point!).

That would tend to drive prices up, since someone in a high-valued country will be able, effectively, to bid more than someone from a low-value country. I've seen several watches go lately that made little or no sense from a dollar standpoint, but were perfectly okay-priced from a Euro standpoint.

Pricing is a complex subject in economics, as you can see from just this very, very brief exposition: I've ignored a large number of additional supply and demand inputs.

Basically speaking, I am fairly convinced that we will see both increases and decreases in prices, depending on market conditions: if the dollar continues to weaken, then prices will increase as Europeans and Asians will be bidding at levels too high for locals, but will bid against each other, but only for highly collectible items (lower end items will be cheaper); if the US economy tanks, then you'll see a large number of watches up for sale, but that will drive prices down (increase in supply --> drop in price), resulting in a buyer's market; if the dollar gains, prices will stabilize; if the economy does well, then prices will increase (collecting watches is a luxury activity, hence increased demand in the face of a better economy ---> increase in price).

And while the US economy may face a quarter of decline - and that's still a maybe - that's not a recession by the usual definition.

And I've seen the dollar move as much as it has in the last several months several times over: the dollar is a fairly volatile currency, which has its advantages and disadvantages. Just remember: exchange rates are not for forever...

JohnF