Let's Talk About Ebay...The Comic Book Elephant In The Room

Hello and welcome to my page once again this is John the creator, owner/operator of valleytown comics just want to say I’m glad to have you and hope everyone is finding everything just fine on the website we just gave the site its fourth face-lift since we started making in officially version 5 you are browsing and we don’t know if we like it but everyone else seems to like it, we just want to create ease of access for everyone and me and my team wish you all a happy april. Got some new stuff coming up, lots of X-Men, some number 11’s everyone seems to be talking about, some superior spider-man and of course a facebook groups favourite character Wolverine.

 

Anywho, lets get right down to it. Let’s talk about Ebay for a second. Ebay, as I’m sure everyone knows and loves and maybe hates a little, is a sales channel of ours, you can find us on there under Xx_Magic_Ninja_xX is our username (long story there) but not sure why as we have wayyy more stuff on our own website than our ebay sales channel. So, a lot of people are questioning what’s the best way to price my comics, im not sure what this is worth, all that. Well our suggestion to you would be for a shoot from the hip kind of thing, go to ebay, search your own comics and select the show only, sold listings, That’s going to allow you to see what your comic was last sold for. That is by far the easiest and fastest way to price a book but there are several things wrong with this, but I’ll let you guys be the judge.

 

Ok, before I type any more, my suggestion right off the bat if your first getting into comics or totally new to selling them or just want to sell some in general or the dreaded “I just inherited my uncles comic collection” thing (there are more of you out there than you realise for the last one) GET YOURSELF A CURRENT OVERSTREET PRICE GUIDE (I’ll leave an ebay link below for this current year so you can pick one up) What the Overstreet price guide is, is not “Current Price” or “what these are going for these days” Overstreet price guides take existing data, from several different sales channels (including ebay) and they put it all together and give you a base “VALUE” in other words it’s pretty much what it is worth because it takes those values and averages them out over time, that’s how to get the true value of something.

 

Ebay, on the otherhand (think of it like the worlds largest flea market) prices are based on a few individuals (mostly each other) and they skew that information based on whats currently available and how much current demand is out there for it. Now there are a few that ask way too much for what they have, but sell it anyway, those of us in the business we call that fixing the system, where the person that listed it buys it themselves or has a friend buy it at a much higher price than normal, then sells the same book for nearly close that amount through another sales channel such as facebook or hipcomic or whatever, sometimes these things go viral and sell so many at such an inflated price (not mentioning any books *cough UF4 *Cough) and stay at that inflated value. Now that’s not to say you can’t pull it up to see the current numbers, however they tend to fluctuate, meaning really high one month and lower the next, It’s very inconsistent with a lot of issue numbers. However, that is not the “value” of the book. We Call that Market Index, kind of like the stock market.

 

The “TRUE” Value of a book is created through trends averaged out over time, through certain major sales channels (not just ebay). The Overstreet Price guide takes those numbers and gives them to you in terms of “True values of books”. Now that’s not current of course it’s not, It’s going off of last years numbers BUT, in terms of “true value” Overstreet is strait up. Now you never know when a book will hit, due to movie releases, or deaths of artists or what have you, that’s why there are things like Ebay.

 

So hopefully that answers the majority of questions and clout that surrounds this common form of misinformation. Hopefully we will have more blog posts like this one in the future where we can share our wealth of information and two cent’s in the industry, Check out some of our new inventory and let us know if you like the new way the site is set up. As always thank you all and Happy collecting!

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