...and this is why that vast majority of us will just leave "real" cart collecting to the wolves and get SD-multi carts. If a majority of you are like me...it is amazing how much I do not care about carts...I am 100% about the games on them.
I am *this-close* to selling every last cart I have and just getting SD carts. I could easily pay for them with the $$ I'd get from these moronic shit-sticks.
I'm with you there.
As much as I liked the retron, in the end I figured i was better off just getting nice systems of the ones I wanted to play and some flash carts. The cash up front was a bit steep but, in the long run it gets cheaper, more so if I would sell my carts.
Anyhow, I get sick of the ebay pricing. We've a local shop that uses that as their minimum. I kid you not, 39.00 super mario world loose cart. 119.99 final fantasy nes, maybe complete but you can't tell because they shrink wrap everything, also no refunds, only exchanges or store credit. I go in there and look every now and then but never buy anything. They are actually a physical front for an ebay sales operation, the stuff in their showroom is just what is not selling on line, also all their product is for sale on line, but the really good stuff they never put out for the public to see. It's just the crap that hasn't sold.
I still do a good bit of sales on ebay, but not video game stuff. Miniature war game stuff, there are the same problems but they market is so much smaller it is only exaggerated on a few rare lines. A friend of mine is more into collecting than I am, and he has been trying to complete one of his collections. Some of those little lead minis he has paid like 300+ for, so the market is getting there and I should imagine it will before too awful much longer.
I figure I did about 8k in sales on ebay last year, and that averages a little over 10 per sale. Most of my stuff was books, dice, and miniatures. Truth be told I didn't make any real profit. I'm just kind of breaking even. If it were not for the top rated seller and power seller discounts I would be way worse off, the fees on ebay and paypal are killer. A lot of times when I sell miniatures I'll send the person a message and suggest they join one of the miniature forums I'm on and be part of our community. I usually sell stuff there a lot cheaper, kind of like how everyone is here. It is the same kind of thing there. In that respect, ebay opened some new markets and helped bring some people into our online community.
It's kind of a win, loose, hit and miss affair, using ebay that is. The age of deals is pretty much dead.
Pretty much anytime I score a deal the seller never ships. I just got done with another case where I won an auction for about 70 under what it was trending at and the guy took the money and never responded again. I've had several dozen cases for various things last year, I sometimes think they must be getting sick of me. Also most of the time there is an issue I go right to the seller so many times I could have opened cases but never did. Also, I dealt out quite a few refunds, thankfully most of my stuff has been so low cost it was not an issue.