Odd pricing on ebay

Money laundering?

The idea is sellers jack up the price like crazy so no one buys from them, to avoid having to delist and relist an item if it's currently out of stock for them. There's probably fees associated for delisting/relisting and no fees for price increases/decreases.

Some sellers would keep a listing active even if they don't have stock. The sellers would put a very high price to discourage buying, since they don't have the item in stock. And the sellers don't know when they'll get any in stock. Sellers do this because a listing that is inactive will get deleted from eBay after 90 days. And the seller would want to keep that listing alive due to it having a long history of having sold some/lots of this item over time.

Perhaps that's what is happening here. Or not.

randyzive wrote: ↑ The idea is sellers jack up the price like crazy so no one buys from them, to avoid having to delist and relist an item if it's currently out of stock for them. There's probably fees associated for delisting/relisting and no fees for price increases/decreases.

I don't think so. It's possible to enter a qty of zero to have it appear as out of stock (though I believe that this needs to be enabled first in the account settings first). I doubt any "experienced seller" would resort to raising price to discourage buying due to lack of inventory.

EliteJay wrote: ↑ I don't think so. It's possible to enter a qty of zero to have it appear as out of stock (though I believe that this needs to be enabled first in the account settings first). I doubt any "experienced seller" would resort to raising price to discourage buying due to lack of inventory.

Actually it's pretty common, I do it myself. It means if someone is willing to buy it for the absurd price, I will just buy it from someone else and resell it.

Jon Lai wrote: ↑ Actually it's pretty common, I do it myself. It means if someone is willing to buy it for the absurd price, I will just buy it from someone else and resell it.

That sounds smart until you realize no legit customer buys an item for $1k over market value when it's available elsewhere. At best they'll ask to cancel after you arrange drop shipping, or you'll get hit with a return, potentially after they do a switcheroo with a broken item, etc.

EliteJay wrote: ↑ I don't think so. It's possible to enter a qty of zero to have it appear as out of stock (though I believe that this needs to be enabled first in the account settings first). I doubt any "experienced seller" would resort to raising price to discourage buying due to lack of inventory.

The zero quantity thing is new-ish... When I was doing a lot of eBay sales 10 ish years ago it wasn't there. I only learned it was there a couple months ago and I still do a few listings a year & have a need to keep the listings up. Sellers who aren't paying attention are probably still using the old method - I know I was.

EliteJay wrote: ↑ That sounds smart until you realize no legit customer buys an item for $1k over market value when it's available elsewhere. At best they'll ask to cancel after you arrange drop shipping, or you'll get hit with a return, potentially after they do a switcheroo with a broken item, etc.

You'll be surprised. Many people on eBay do not sort by lowest price, they keep the default "Best Match", which, based on eBay's algorithm, involves certain things like how popular your listing is. The higher priced listing with 50 sales is going to rank higher in Best Match compared to the listing that is cheaper but without any sales, or with only a few sales.

There were items where the market price was consistent at around $110-120, and I had raised by price by $5 after a few more sells. Eventually I got to $160 and had the last one I was willing to sell (but still had more available for myself). People kept buying them. So I added more quantity to my listing and repriced it to $180. It took a while longer, but eventually it did sell, so I shipped the one I had and subsequently bought one of the $110 ones to replenish the one I had sold from my own collection, and upped the price another $5 - even buy having to rebuy, I netted $50 after fees. Rinse and repeat. I eventually got all the way up to $240 before the cheaper listings dried up, and the lowest price has raised to $180, which is no longer a big enough gap for it to make sense to continue doing this. By now, my listing had over 60 sales and was consistently ranked first in Best Match. Not wanting to let go of this gem of a listing, I've now repriced it to $400.

If it sells, great, if it doesn't, I don't expect it to anyways. But for the record, the highest priced for this item on eBay is $500, so I'm not the most expensive at least.