I find it funny that pinside forums most often side with the seller in these situations. It’s considered rude to “price police” if the potential buyers think the price is too high. At the same time, it’s totally ok to call this guy out on a “lowball” offer. There are certain sellers on here that I won’t even look at their ads because I know they overvalue the crap out of every pin they put up for sale.

As far as I’m concerned, the buyer is the one accepting all of the risk (has to travel, putting up the money, relying on pictures to see the condition of the machine). The worst thing that can happen to a seller is that they don’t sell the machine, while the buyer can get screwed in many ways.

If you put OBO on your listing, I think it’s only polite to respond to the offers you receive. It literally takes 5 seconds to say “no, thank you”. Similarly, I would never offer 10% of the asking price. Common courtesy goes a long way.

I agree with you in that there is a pinball golden rule in that you should treat others how you would like to be treated.

I do disagree somewhat in your assessment of the nonsense. Sure, people may waste your time as a seller, but I’ve wasted my time and money as well by showing up and looking at machines that are obviously in much worse condition than stated in the ads, the Williams/Bally error dot is present, has a weak flipper, etc.

I feel like, as a seller, you should expect people to be wary. They don’t know you, they don’t know the history of the machine, and there is nowhere that you can get an up to date and accurate price, especially with all of the mods, shaker motors, upgraded speakers, etc. I think a lot of people are just going with NIB products because of the issues they’ve had buying in the past. It costs $0 to list here on pinside, so the most you are out is time. I think the high resale prices are making all of us a little more picky on what we buy. I would never go to a used car lot and pay full price and I don’t think you would either.

My personal advice is to never sell or buy anything as expensive as a pinball machine online, sight unseen, unless you personally know the buyer/seller or there it’s a business you can deal with if everything goes South. I think this is where a lot of the problems occur.
In person, you can inspect and both sides can sign an “as is” agreement after the inspection takes place.

I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, I just feel that the actual risk is on the buyers side most of the time