OP tried to sell 2 pins here... apparently both did not sell.

Fireball - $1300 - good condition (pinside estimate: $830-$970)
Meteor - $1000 - some work needed (pinside estimate: $650-$750)

And on each he states price is negotiable.

My point being that OP appears to like to haggle on pricing he prices high, knowing it will sell for less, and offers low, knowing he will pay more.

Myself, when I sell things, I price it at what I think it's worth, or what I want to get out out of it (whichever is higher)

And when buying will offer what I think it's worth or what I'm willing to pay, which ever is lower.

So if I see a machine that I want to pay $2k for, but prior sales show that $1800 is what it's worth... I'll offer up $1700-1800 with links to the games that have recently sold, but be willing to move up to my max .

At the same time, if a game is listed at $3k but worth $2.5k and I only want to spend $2k on it, I'll only offer $2k, and if they don't accept it, I don't whine and complain about it. We live in a free market.

I agree with this.

If you're serious about a sale, you answer all offers... you never know what a buyers motivations are, or what they're top price is."

I'm not trying to start anything.... just pointing out there are differing negotiation styles. so it's good to talk

You might find a Raven for $900, but thats about it.

Bally lost world. Not a project, game works and plays 100% recently had new rubber. $750

Pretty much the shit show I thought it would be. I feel like for having to read thru this turd's thread you should be awarded a Keneda podcast tote bag.

Everyone interprets the written word differently. You say your message to the seller stated:

Your statement is open ended. There is no question being asked there. You are basically baiting the seller to reply *if* he/she is interested. That is how I interpret your statement. If you said "I have $900 to spend. Would you sell the game to me for that?" then maybe you may have elicited a different response.

If I wasn't interested in your offer I wouldn't have replied to you immediately, but probably would have replied with a quick no thank you. I know that I would have followed through with any other offers first. There are a number of unknowns here:

1. You do not know how many other offers are on the table.
2. You do not know what other buyers are offering $$ wise.
3. You do not know how much money the seller has in the game.
4. You do not know how desperate the seller is to sell.
5. You do not know the sellers mindset after receiving your offer.

How much time elapsed between your message to the seller and you posting this thread? Days or weeks?

Regarding your position on sellers making this hobby more expensive, I do not think that is fair assessment. Sellers set the asking price, sure, but it take a buyer to make a transaction occur. One single sale is not going to change the market. It took a lot of sales and a lot of years to reach the market prices we are currently seeing. In my opinion the only way to see a meaningful decrease in prices for buyers to stop buying games for an extended period of time. Your purchase of a SBM for $900 isn't going to affect the market in any meaningful way.

I dont know if this has been mentioned, but pinside has a daily cap on messages for non paying members. If I'm getting a lot of reasonable offers, I cant afford to spend a message being polite to a lowball offer.

Math time.

Let’s see here...

$1500 x .6 = $900

Let’s say I have a super nice game I’ve listed fairly at 8k.

$8000 x .6 = $4800

Yeah, great start to a negotiation. I reply to basically everybody that replies to an ad of mine... but c’mon man, 60 percent of the value is not worth ANYBODY’s time here.

Should I also reply if you offer a dollar? And if I don’t, would you also start another incredulous thread about it and throw shade at everybody?

What is happening here, why is o-din editing out his posts? I can deduct a reason from the flow of this topic.

Now, now...
You're not being stupid,
you're just being timab2000.

Flame suit on...

I see a lot of comments along these lines and I get that some people might not be able to afford the hobby that they have loved and that pisses em off.

However, buying and selling pinball is a business, and if people were not willing to pay the prices, prices would not be as high. With pinball having a resurgence, people are paying the prices. I would not expect the prices to come down much lower anytime soon. A lot of longer term hobbyist are longing for the days of cheap NIB, warehouse raids, and pinball as a commodity and priced as such. Those days are over the foreseeable future. Bitching and complaining about it, while cathartic, will achieve nothing.

The stark reality is that if you are not willing to pay the prices or of limited means, you need to recalibrate your expectations about buying certain types of machines. If you can not afford NIB, look used; if you can not get something recent, look to the 90s, can't afford them, look to the early solid state and EM. Hell, with the rise of location pinball, you don't even need to own machines to be a pinball fan. A lot of players and pinball fans don't own a single machine.

Having pinball machine(s) in your house is a luxury, not a birth right or necessity.

Sellers are always getting slammed for absurd prices around here. If the seller of the Silverball Mania was asking $3299 because the game only had 600 plays in the last 12 years, he might be getting slammed too.

IMO, that SBM was in really good condition compared to how they normally are, so $1500 with cabinet stencils wasn't out of line. That make's your $900 offer too low, and the wording of your offer left "no response" as an option without the seller being rude.

The choices are not either "offer full price" or "any offer is good and should be responded to." There are grey areas.

That's the part I find most intimidating about trying to buy a game. You never know if the seller is expecting to haggle or how much they wiggle room they put in the asking price. I'd much rather see someone asking a firm reasonable price. Inevitably some potential buyers will assume they could get it for less. If the OP had offered $1200 the seller may have thought that the opening low number of negotiations. Might even piss them off if you say "no, that really is my best offer."

If I were that serious about a machine I don't think I'd waste time low-balling. They may get several better offers in the meantime. Even if you would have gone that high you risk losing out on starting a conversation.

This hobby is also a bit different than some where you also have to factor in condition. A game be be fully operational but the playfield is worn down to bare wood in several spots. Others may look perfect but have major electronic or mechanical flaws. Different people devalue this different amounts.

So, you did get a reply back after 24 hrs. & what that was too long to wait ?

No harm no foul. As I said, that wording and sentiment is something that I see all the time on here. My posting was more of a general comment on the state of affairs, although I quoted you.

I agree with your sentiment that it never hurts to ask for pricing concessions. I am going through an extremely extensive home remodeling and I have negotiated pricing for large ticket items (windows, siding, roofing, plumbing, and lighting. I have received pricing concessions that have totaled up so far north of 25K in just materials. However, I have spent many multiples of that amount with my suppliers to get those concessions. Relating it to pinball, if your are spending more, there is more latitude in pricing. If you are looking at a less expensive machine, discounts are going to be less.

Off topic: As part of this process I have learned for things that you would buy off the internet like lighting, plumbing, and high end electronics, place the items in your shopping basket and then call into the company's sales team and asks for their best prices. You will be pleasantly surprised with the results. These sales reps (called inside sales reps) will rather give you more of a discount so that you place the order with them (so that they get credited and paid on the order) vs letting the order be processed via the internet (where they do not get credit). An inside sales rep hipped me up to this during one of the first purchases and I now use this with everything that I purchase online. One crazy example was that LG's flagship OLED TV that came out in early May with an MSRP of $3,300 I got for $2,200 during Memorial Day Weekend. Give it a try.

I thought this thread was going to be about why OBO is even an option.

You can choose FIRM, nothing, or OBO. If I have an ad that says $1500 FIRM, everyone would know that’s the least I am willing to take for it. If I don’t put FIRM, then isn’t it OBO?

Honestly I wouldn't have replied. You are basically saying that is your top dollar offer. You don't say that you have any more than that so won't meet me halfway at $1200. I'd ignore you, sorry dude. You need to make it obvious you are open to meeting in the middle.

Yep, I would have read your message just as you wrote it. You have $900, reply if interested. He wasn't interested at selling it for $900, he didn't reply. You basically told him not to reply if he wasn't interested, then complained when he didn't reply.

One other thought for the OP.

It may not be the case every time, but in my experiences with pinball machines the window for wiggle room or negotiation is rather small. It took me some time to grasp that (and I wont claim to be an expert on pinball prices). If you are counting on some significant negotiation when buying you will miss out on a lot in the pinball world.

There are always outliers, but most pinball sales probably occur within $100 or so of asking prices.

Wiggle room examples: 1000=100 2000=200 3000=300 4000=400 ect, ect,

It's my experience that Pinside members are pretty much being dicks. Everyone here has their own sense of entitlement.... Lots of people don't respond, but they think they are OK for not responding. Those who do respond can misrepresent things. Just do what you want to do and forget these middle aged men who all have their own opinions that mean nada.

So I’ve had this happen where I’ll receive an offer at 50% of ask. With the buyer wanting to settle somewhere around 75%. Why? Because that’s in the middle of their first offer and my asking price. And for most pin sales for us in the hobby, we have a good idea of the right sales price. So I just politely say no thank you and now a number of times I’ve had buyers act like a complete douche that I won’t take the lowball offer. So like some other responders, if it’s too low of an original offer I likely won’t respond, it just doesn’t seem like a “reasonable” offer.

I have never used OBO when selling a machine. I don't like the underlying message it sends to potential buyers. (I want to get rid of this thing fast) It used to be that Posting on CL was bad enough (sending the dump message) The way I look at it is, if you put OBO on your ad, you are inviting all offers no matter what those offers are.

I don't care if the price says firm or OBO, I'm still going to make an offer.

Agreed. “OBO” is implied anyway unless you say “firm.” In which case you’ll still probably get offers, but at least you warned them so you’re less likely to have a thread started about you on Pinside.

Dicks is putting it lightly. I love the ones who when selling believe what they have is gold. When you are selling it somehow takes a massive hit. I asked for pricing advice from someone this week and I received the biggest crock of crap I've seen in a long time. Showed a few collectors the *advice* who were amazed at how self serving it was.

Sometimes, silence speaks volumes.

Or, it can simply mean an offer is too low to bother with, especially if the guy has already received offers higher than that.

If you need a reply, try asking for one. "Please let me know what you think of my offer, as I would really like your game and I don't want to spend the money on something else, or miss out on another game, while I wonder about yours. Thank you!"

And as another poster commented, using incorrect words ("if your interested") can't help.

Found the millennial? I kid...

And that's the way it should be as long as your offer is reasonable I will respond. If it's a low ball offer I may not respond but if you come back and up it, I will respond. I am buyer too. I like to get a good deal just like all the rest of you. If I want to make a low ball offer on an ad I will wait till that ad has been up for awhile and do it tactfully like leave me name and number incase you don't sell it and need to get it gone!

Could be a non-price issue generating the non-response. Just because something is for sale doesn’t mean you’d be willing to sell it to just any person. If someone is super new to the hobby or has bad feedback or seems unreliable (just some examples) then just ignoring their pm is fine in my book. If someone offers 1% of asking price i would assume they were just trolling.

If a buyer seems like just dealing with them will be a hassle then not responding to them is nicer than telling them they aren’t worthy of doing business with you for whatever reason.

Bingo! Someone who needs alot of pleases and thank-you's might be too much trouble at any price.

This is a pet peeve of mine. It usually ends the negotiation if someone asks this. What is the lowest i would take? Usually when i list something, i list it for the price i want....if you have a lower offer, feel free to make it but to ask what is the lowest i would go to me is rude...How about, what is the highest your willing to offer? Hint: if its not close to my asking price, why waste our time?

I find that most people here are the same middle aged men with their own thinking, that their ideas are best.

With that in mind, I don't expect to get much of a response from you all. Unfortunately this seems to be the only real place for pinball happenings. Maybe one day we'll have more forums.

I, on the other hand - actually have manners and would respond "No thank you". Please and thank you are the best way to go about life. But again - we're dealing with middle aged men who are children here, lol...

It's all part of the negotiation process. Same with buying & selling cars isn't it? All you have to say is: My price is firm!!

But my price is not firm...i listed it for what i am hoping to get but i am not randomly going to knock off hundreds of dollars because someone asks me my lowest price. That is not a negotiation at all. Usually a negotiation involves an offer (listing an ad with a price) and a counteroffer...again, i already listed it WITH my price! If you would like to make an offer, go ahead but dont ask me to lower my price without making an offer that is serious..then i know you can at least pay a reasonable amount and are serious and not just kicking tires.

I could say "yes" but the answer is "no".

When I went into the car biz with a friend who had many years experience I was taught that you cannot work with " Would ya take?, or "What is your bottom dollar ?" I learned that people who make those kinds of questions are shopping around and that the correct response is, " I will take the price that I placed on the windshield.", "What is your top dollar? or "What will you give?"

If I give the "would ya take" dude a lower price he would always say thanks and leave. And then I figured out he went down the street to another lot where there was a similar car he was wanting and tell that lot that ABC down the street will sell his for .......

But if I am asking $XYZ and you tell me you will give $XYY that is an offer I can work with. I can tell you "thanks, but I cannot go that low, but I can shave off a little bit. And then the back and forth begins.

Too many people think "What is your bottom dollar?" is the way to start a negotiation. It's not. If you want to start a negotiation then start a negotiation by having an idea of the market value and open up with "I'll give you such and such....." Now, the seller can counter. If you can't do that then either you don't have any money or you are bored on a Saturday morning with nothing better to do than waste a seller's time.

My interpretation of “Best offer” is that said person is asking $4k and there are multiple offers then $4100 may take the cake not if you only get one offer and it’s $3k you win?
But every offer should get a response even if it’s “ no thank you”

Once again, few people can agree on what even a stop sign means.

The good news is that it doesn’t really matter. If you are inflexible or don’t price your games within the current market, it won’t sell.

Here’s what matters.
Price
Condition
Distance
Are you a dick?

Hers what doesn’t matter.
How much you paid
How much you think it’s worth
If your price is firm or not

Happy selling!

I don’t know where people get this idea of OBO meaning higher than the price offered...
Does that ever happen? It seems like that would constitute an auction, which is not allowed on pinside