Patient people get deals, impatient people create deals.
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smart 
Be realistic with current used pricing and you’ll be fine. Also, clean your gear before posting. Uploading a dusty dirty piece of hardware will do your sale no favors.
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Same, because I price my items fairly. I’m not buying something for a 10-20% discount and missing out on warranties/ documentation. Why would I do the same thing to others?
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If the gear I’m selling is in perfect condition and was bought by me new then I take the current retail price and deduct tax (20% in UK) and then take a bit more off because after all it is second hand. The tax was not originally part of the product price and went straight to the government, I’m not expecting the buyer to cover that. I apply the same rule to purchases unless the item is hard to come by and i can’t be arsed waiting.
I don’t think it’s over saturated. As long as folks buy new gear there will be a market for used gear, it’s just a reflection. I suspect the uptake in folks buying new during lockdown and now moving stuff on has made the second hand market more buoyant.
I do agree it’s annoying when people think their pre owned gear is worth almost the same as new gear. The thing that got me was the astronomical prices for faulty/broken equipment. I used to buy almost all my stuff faulty from eBay and trade ins in shops (remember those?) but the prices just went daft. I don’t flip stuff so there was no margin as such but still, parts missing, undiagnosed faults, unobtainable parts and the sellers thought they were sat on a gold mine. There is/was one shop on eBay in Germany that had loads of faulty gear but the prices were just laughable. Stuff that was only good for salvaging parts, well beyond repair and they wanted collector piece prices.
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Observation: People rarely talk about figuring out the market price for something when they talk about what it should sell for (from buyer’s or seller’s perspective). But if you want to sell or find a piece of gear quickly, the market price is an important factor. (Finding market price on ebay or reverb means: Checking the list of prices the item has SOLD for—not the prices being asked now.)
As a Reverb seller, I found that if I priced gear to sell on the lower end of the market price range, and did a careful honest listing, the gear would sell and stay sold.
People get caught up in what’s “fair” or what a piece of gear “is worth” or “what it should sell for,” but the market doesn’t care about all that. If you feel you must get a certain price to meet your own expectations, that’s cool but you may have to wait.
All this avoids the question of whether money is just tight all over right now. You can’t eat a synth, and they don’t burn well in the fireplace either.
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Maybe used gear has to compete with much lower priced new gear now, aside from the big upsurge in budget gear a lot of premium priced gear gets heavily discounted after not too long, thinking stuff like the MPC range and Korg gear. As an example recently I have been thinking (for about the 5th time!) about getting a Force, used they go for £700-£800 maybe with a few extras thrown in, but new price is £979 with next day delivery, 3 year warranty and is often negotiable or use vouchers etc. At launch they were like £1200 or thereabouts.
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I didn’t have any problem selling gear after I made deep slashes to my prices.
SLASH! SLASH! SLASH!
DON’T MISS OUT ON OUR SUPER LOW PRICES!
ECONOMY DOWN? SO ARE MY PRICES!
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Aieesh, don’t I know it.
I spotted an inactive channel in mid-side mode in a supposedly working eq, asked a kind friend to replace a relay that could be to blame (i can build but not repair without lifting pads.)
The relay was responding correctly, but there was a HEAP of oily gunk (bike brake chain spill? not some sort of pro-gold what still shouldn’t be there ) pooled under the board that required ultrasound removal, board trace issues, and my poor friend is still at it.
This and after spending 3 months or so back and forthing to repair a (new!) $2500 rackmount item
I am much more paranoid at this point about buying complicated gear.
I’ll never get into a direct argument with anyone about it but I love reading about how people “have principles” and get more and more angry about getting no bites when they don’t check historic prices, consider reasons why something has been supplanted by something else, don’t take into account the relative un-rarity of the gear with the niche community interested in it.
My favorite spice is “I WILL ONLY SELL THIS EURORACK SYSTEM IN FULL” craigslist ads which offer an unthinkable 10% off the $3000+ cost of uninteresting, super-basic modules that nobody would buy in isolation.
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I was monitoring a xdj 700 player, they are out of stock, 2nd hand they go now for 800 to 1000, at least the sellers think they should go for that. New price was 700. Now the shops sell them for 780, i think they monitor ebay too.
Nightmare if something is out of stock. Dont know what happens if a Force MK2 is presented, 4Gig of RAM could make the current gen really dated.
I think there was now 3 years with not too many interesting synth coming out, that makes old gear also more valuable. The xdj is 7 years old, but it does do what is necessary.
There are definitely a lot of dumb pricings. I don’t know how true it is generally, but having seen the 2nd hand prices in Sweden and Germany, Germany is at a hard 20-30% more expensive.
For example, an A4 mk1 might go for 400€ in Sweden while in Germany it’s generally at 650€. The smaller the market the better the prices I suppose. If you live in Europe, I think you could take advantage of this with a bit of research.
The dumbest price I ever saw was an Monomachine sfx-6 with keyboard for 770€ in Sweden, last year, when I was really broke. I still think about that sometimes.
Modular is a weird use case, but part of the allure is building from scratch and making your own combination of modules. Can’t think why anyone would buy a full system unless it was awesome and a great price. But modules also wax and wane through popularity, easy one month, hard the next. And modular does seem to have some staying power, because ‘swappability’ is sort of built into its core, and the barrier is lower - one module couple be a couple hundred or less. Hardware boxes are bit more like that full system with a higher price tag.
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can someone Econosplain the phenomena of ‘I just want to get what I paid for it’ used prices… I don’t get it, if they just want to get what they paid for it doesn’t that mean that they are selling it at the new price instead of a used, driven off the lot price, how did this become the norm?
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I reckon it’s not and what’s leading to the over saturated market.
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I don’t know if those people have more money than sense or are way over their head financially in many senses and this is one of those things that’s symptomatic of their credit being a smoking irradiated husk in the middle of Neo-Tokyo.
Maybe both?
Not really a GAS story, but stubbornness in excess-
A friend’s father was successful at general contractor but would CONSTANTLY get into one-sided feuds that also escalated one-sidedly.
He would stop paying bills and rationalize excuses, causing the loss of a home. He stopped paying for a storage facility and lost all the artifacts of his deceased wife so his kids had little but memories of her. He didn’t get exactly what he was expecting from inheritance after a death, so he sued the rest of the family.
Some people were just born to shoot themselves in the foot, repeatedly.
I just feel like at the least, if you’re not offering a 30 day return policy that you shouldn’t be trying to sell something used as new… Now if you’re selling something you purchased, and never opened then I can understand you made a mistake or changed your mind and should get something close to the retail price…but otherwise…
I also understand those selling rare pieces or hard to find/get pieces for astronomical prices and the people who just have to have those items and are willing to mortgage a house to get them… that’s a different issue between two consenting parties.
but the I just bought and used this kit for 5 hours and I would like to get all the money back for my rental by selling it to you for the retail price without giving you any of the retail benefits is just weird
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If you’ve lived your entire life in a reasonably functional “western” / “first world” economy and don’t engage with black markets, then you have to make an effort to interact with a real market.
If you grew up in a developing or state-planned economy or are/were an illegal drug user, you probably have a better sense of market dynamics than the typical American. (I assume the same is true of Western Europeans, but I don’t think I’ve spent much money outside of cafes and pubs in Europe 
)
So most people approach markets like they would any other retailer: they think only about themselves and don’t realize that you actually need to do market research to perform price discovery before forming a strong opinion about how much a thing should cost.
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I feel like an unrealistic relationship with money is just another part of GAS psychology.
I don’t think Americans are altogether inexperienced with barter and similar, we have rummage sales (and certainly Craigslist.)
I will refrain from discussing a culture of solipsism and individual exceptionalism 
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I’m trying to be productive right now, stop saying things I want to respond to.
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