Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Failure (Part 4)

Fear of failure must never be a reason not to try something.

In this series, I am dissecting all the objects an acquaintance of mine had why he’d never be successful in running a bot.

[2] If he bid on a collection of cards on Ebay, he’d be overpaying for them.

I would disagree, I find that this is an unlikely scenario.  Something is worth only what someone else will pay for it.  A baseball card may have a book value of $1,000,000; but until someone actually is willing to spend $1,000,000 for that baseball card, it is not worth a million dollars.

Similarly, auctions work the same way.  The winner pays just a little more than what someone else is willing to pay.  So while one may feel as if they have overpaid for an item, the reality is that someone else would have paid almost as much as you did for said item.

Naturally, this assumes that you are bidding on auctions and not using a Buy It Now feature.  With that, it is difficult to gauge what the auction is really worth.  A 20,000 card auction sounds impressive but if it is 20,000 commons and the buyer wants $2,000 for it, well, you get the idea.  Do not bid on Buy It Now unless you know the value of what you are bidding on.

[3] Wouldn’t be able to sell the cards at cost, much less at a profit.

There are two (2) aspects to this.  There is an emotional and somewhat irrational aspect to this line of thinking.  Yes, emotions and feelings are powerful and need to be taken into account, but one must not let their emotions and feelings dominate their lives.  People get into trouble when not thinking clearly and calmly.

The real valid point of this complaint, when you boil it down, is what to price the cards at as to maximize profits.  That’s a tricky question and a moving target.  Companies spend a lot of money trying to answer that question.  It depends on competition, scarcity of the cards in question, level of demand, and what level of profit are you comfortable with.  That one is not so easily answered.

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