Used Components On Ebay
 

There are a couple of categories of parts I watch out for on ebay, typically non-Shimano Japanese stuff. Recently, I've been seeing a LOT less of this sort of stuff used.

I've got a theory - due to CL, the $10 dollar garage sale finds are harder to find & it is a lot harder to turn a worthwhile profit parting out a $100-$150 dollar bike. So some/a lot of these guys that basically had a businesses going on parting out extremely cheap old bikes on ebay have more or less disappeared.

I don't think it is seasonal, fwiw.

Thoughts/comments?

Huh. I would say that without real statistics it is hard to say. I don't track any one group closely enough to say myself.
I have noticed certain things have gone for really high prices.

I've paid less the $25 (including shipping) for these in the last year. This is $69.45
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...=STRK:MEDWX:IT
Or $60 for a similar pair
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...=STRK:MEDWX:IT
(oops, showing Shimano...)

Suntour Ultra 6 speed freewheel. $21.5 with shipping. Pretty big contrast to the BIN for similar items.
So maybe the money isn't there.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...=STRK:MEDWX:IT

Ebay take quite a cut on my sales, and after some difficult customers I am not putting as much on ebay at the moment.

Not sure that there is a lack of listings on ebay. For example, if you look at Cycling >Bicycle Parts >Road Bike Parts >Derailleurs there are about 2000 listings and at Cycling >Vintage >Vintage Parts & Accessories are 7,568 listings as I write this. If you are looking for something in particular might not be there possibly but there are plenty of vintage components listed...

It's funny how certain type of parts seem to pop up all of a sudden and then suddenly fade away.
I still remember a couple of years ago when I had zero luck finding Mavic 800 series deraileurs in ebay, specially the "erector style" 851 RD.
Suddenly about a little over a year ago, they started appearing, first very slowly with a trickle of a couple of marginal condition used ones here and at very high prices, then a good wave with few always on auction everyday at eBay, a good number of them NOS. At first, they went for almost $200 dollars for NOS examples, now the prices for the erector RD is down substantially at sometimes even below $120. Now that the rush for the 851s have pretty much ended, they pretty much dissapeared again with only a couple of beat up ones popping up here and there once in a while.
I think the market for sertain items like these tend to overheat and the bubble pops. Everyone then moves to looking for another component item.
Another good example of these classic components going throught he pricing and availability rollercoaster, the once ubiquitous Stronglight A9 headsets are now considered as rare as chicken lips and as expensive as their weight in gold....Dang!, A9s used to come with even the cheapest Treks back in the 80's a a multitude of manufacturers had them as standard on many of their bike models back then. In the late 80's I even remember seeing whole bunches of A9s being sold at large Trek dealer clearance bins just zipped tied together and being bounced around by shoppers. I should have grabbed a boxfull of them back then, and I could sell them at way over 100 bucks a pop easy these days!
So, who the heck is hoarding all that 80s clear brake cable casing sets??!!:mad:.........How much for 20 feet of the stuf??........:rolleyes:

Chombi

+1 I think the higher prices draw some parts out of inventory at the hobby flipper/part seller. Then once we all flood the market, the prices drop, and we pull back our inventory. As prices go up (again), I think parts will again start showing up on ebay. There still seem to be a number of hipsters out there stripping vintage multi-speed parts, and you also have the people that like to upgrade their older bikes to a newer standard.

Well, I've definitely seen that overheat and pop phenomenon. I know I caused one a couple of years back when I sold a really beat up pair of Specialized Touring Pedals for about 85 dollars. Really, they were awful. Then all of a sudden, there are 5 auctions for these things, whereas there hadn't been any for 6 months.

But some of these guys (remember sultanofschwag) were clearly working the garage sale -> parted out on Ebay carry trade. I really don't see so many of those type of guys anymore.

I just sold these Suzue hubs last week, been a while since a full set has turned up, although front hubs are in abundance. I'm sort of curious whether that will set off another frenzy...

I know a couple of these hipsters, and they are in such a hurry to strip the derailleurs and brakes, that they don't even bother to the keep the hardware necessary to put the brakes back on or attach cables to the derailleurs. :mad:

I get the feeling these particular hipsters are way to lazy to list any parts on eBay though.

No. The number of sellers parting out bikes is not enough to have any impact on the market.

How come market/sales discussions are allowed outside of the Valuations forum?

-Kurt

Because no ones asking what something is worth? Besides, if all threads were catergorized all of RC would be moved to foo or general cycling.

Thank you.

Adam Smith
 

I agree, but there is something called Capitalism, and Ebay is a good place to experience it's workings.:D

Mike(gioscinelli)

Currently:

Cinelli Super Corsa Columbus SLX Campagnolo Record Carbon equipped.

Gios Torino Professional Columbus SL Tubing, Campagnolo Record C equipped.

Orbea Onix Carbon Fiber with Shimano Ultegra and Shimano wheels.

Peugeot Mixte All French.

Bianchi Cross country bike (hybrid of city and mountain bike)

http://i428.photobucket.com/albums/q...ileresized.jpg

http://i428.photobucket.com/albums/q...ofessional.jpg

http://i428.photobucket.com/albums/q.../OrbeaOnix.jpg

http://i428.photobucket.com/albums/q...ugeotMixte.jpg

I'm not sure I agree with that. For a lot of the mid-rangey parts, there used to be several guys obviously specializing in this and I think that their auctions did form a significant portion of the market. Again, there used to be more guys who would have hundreds of used parts up there, obviously from parting out garage sale bikes. Now, the guys remaining who have hundreds of parts/auctions tend to be slanted much more towards new/nos stuff.

I know this is all anecdotal, just asking to see if anyone else has been making observations similar to mine.

I think the fenders on the mixte could use some adjustment.

Some?

If one is going to plaster a thread with your favorite bike porn, well, it better be perfectomende.

I am not even sure what the purpose of the post was as it adds nothing to the discussion (not that I can discern anyway).

This post doesn't ad anything either but I can say I have not been selling anything on ebay as they take too much money and it's a lot of work for not very much payoff. It almost feels like charity sometimes when I am cleaning up a part and I think about how little I will actually "make" on it. It's literally peanuts. But I'm not in business, just trying to make bigger purchases more affordable by selling off what I don't need. So I just post in the forsale section, editing my post every once in a while and it slowly but surely trickles away and the new stuff trickles in.

+1 On the components I have bought on ebay, the seller would have done better just posting to this forum and avoiding all of the ebay fees. But most of the components I buy on ebay are mid grade Suntour friction parts and other common parts.

And thats my point.....several guys dont set the market in a market this big. At the moment there are 8,000 vintage parts listings and ~18,000 non-new listing for parts

You make some good points. A vast majority of us dont do this to make ends meet or to make a living. For those who do it doesnt matter if they make a few bucks off each item. At the end of the day if they're averaging $8/hr thats more than what they'd make at McDonalds or a low rent job they'd have to pay income taxes on.

I find the fees to be extremly reasonable considering what Ebay and Paypal offer and I know I can easily make more than enough extra $$$$ on Ebay to make up for the fees. Sometimes I simply dont have the time. With editing, uploading of pictures etc I can write 4-6 ads an hour. If I have 20 items to sell that means I need 4-5 hours just to write ads.

I'll give my parts away before I make 'peanuts' on them....

In the big picture this forum is a speck in the universe of bike parts selling. Balancing fees versus returns is one of the finer points of ebay selling.

I guess I would contend that 10 guys, each with 100-200 listings or so, thats 1-2k parts, would affect a market that size, and if they were tending to be guys stripping parts from mid-range bikes as opposed to hoarders of NOS, those midrangey parts form a much smaller part of those 8000 parts, so the market I'm looking at is much smaller than that.

But, I guess we are just not going to see eye to eye on this and I was soliciting opinions...

To do 100-200 concurrent listings on ebay, one would need a template, and about 5 days of FT work taking, editing, sizing and hosting 1000 pictures or so and writing descriptions, unless done half-rear ended, which does not help the seller's cause. I think that 20 is probably a more realistic upper limit (and that would take a solid 2 full days of work to do right.)

There are a couple of guys on eBay which regularly have 50-100 auctions at any given time. Some disappear after a while and never list again, others pop back up after a few months of inactivity. There are a few "shop" level sellers who do have, at any given time, well over 200 items listed. Usually BIN for 30 days at a time though. If you're looking for a list of some of the bigger sellers on ebay of vintage parts, check out the "sellers list" on VeloBase.com. I keep a list of sellers there who have agreed to let me use their photos from their completed auctions, most of them regularly have a dozen or better listings.

+1 Unless you have repeat listings for the same item, its a lot of work to list on ebay. I sell about four to six items a week on ebay, none of it bike related. All of the items I sell are one offs, so that means taking pictures, writing ads, very little template use. Its pretty marginal return wise. I can't imagine selling 100 items a week, without lots of repeats, and full time dedication to the effort.

I am just doing it as an opportunistic enterprise, find something interesting, sell it, build a paypal fund, recycle it into bicycle stuff, and repeat.

I definitely agree with that. I practically get into time/motion studies when I'm prepping ads and packing stuff up. Actually, for stuff that I expect to sell under $50-$100 dollars, I've gotten to where I write pretty terse ads, no template, one or two pics - I figure most of the oddbal vintage stuff I'm selling, the buyers tend to know for what they are looking and will ask me questions if they need more info. I do take some care in the titles so that they will have a lot of search hits. I've found it isn't worth the time (to me) to write up a wonderful ad with lots of pics for $40 item so I can make an extra ten bucks. Same goes for CL.