Hello Everyone:

one of the problems I have seen in recent years is how price guides are affecting prices and sales of model trains and toy trains.

Sadly there is too many amatuer sellers who immediately think they have gold as soon as they see an item they have in the price guide.

Price guides are used as a guideline and not necessarily what the item or items will actually sell for.

Condition plays a big roll on what an item will sell for, and a lot of people who resell a lot of trains and use the price guides for selling prices need to realize this.

Price guides are nice, but in some cases I feel they are an obmination on the hobby due to so many people looking for a quick buck.

One rule of thumb is to look on ebay, toy train magazines, ads, and elsewhere before pricing an item for sale.

There's Mint, Nr Mint, Excellent, Very Good, and Good as the main condition guide for trains.

Vintage American Flyer, and Lionel are considered toy trains and there is a lot of price guides for these trains.

a good example of pricing on ebay is the Hawthorne Village Trains, Bachmann makes these trains for Hawthorne Village, and the trains normally sell for $69.00 per subscription plus shipping, but there is sellers who try to ask for more for each of them even though most of the trains are still available from Hawthorne Village directly.

Then there's the sellers who put "Rare"or "Hard to Find" on a common item just to pull in more sales, I admit I use those headings in some auctions for items I have for sale from time to time, but I actually use it on items that are rare or hard to find.

Now another thing that faces a lot of sellers on ebay is general pricing, sure a lot of would like to get retail prices on items, but there is a lot of places on the internet like Train world or Wholesale Trains that offer low prices so a lot of people look at the auctions and say why bother bidding on the item when you can get it cheaper elsewhere.

Then there's the Greedy Sellers who charge outrageous shipping fee's or a ridiculous handling fee, I realize Gas Prices are up and Ebay Fee's as well as Pay Pal fee's are up also, but the fact of matter is a lot of these sellers need to be more realistic when doing this so they can have happy customers and more sales.

I am not out to flame anyone while writing this little guide, I am only mentioning this because I have had a lot of people ask me such questions off and on, so I decided to mention all of this to help others as an aid in sales on ebay.

take care and good luck

George