What are your selling experiences regarding the demand/ value/ buyers' repsonses when it comes to the question of "what kind of new" a set is?

 

Meaning: How successful have you been in selling NEW sets whose contents you DID VERIFY by (opening and) inspecting the box contents vs. selling NEW sets that were 100 % sealed whose contents you DID NOT VERIFY?

 

(The background of my question is the problem of not really being able to know about the condition of contents in boxes with only seals - which could have been tampered with without visual evidence; hence controlling the content yourself before selling as NEW would be the safest was to be absolutely sure.)

 

Looking forward to hearing about your personal experiences!

After seven years of collecting, I have not come across one set that was missing anything.  I would not open the box to verify the contents unless you can tell that the seals were tampered with.  After you open the box, the set is considered "used" and can take a portion of your profits from you.  I would be more concerned about receiving bad feedback for calling an opened set "new" than receiving bad feedback for a set that is missing pieces.

There are buyers (mainly from South Korea - which I have now excluded) who will leave negative feedback immediately if a single seal is either not intact, misaligned or double-sealed even at source.  It's is critically important in my opinion that a set can only be declared as MISB (meaning fit for resale to a very fussy customer) if it only has one layer of seals which are intact, straight and the box has no holes or dents.  If I have a box that is damaged or seals broken I remove/check the contents and state this in the listing as unboxed in large red font so the buyer knows what they are getting.

 

Be careful, eBay "crooks" are mainly buyers these days.

Sounds like a great blog idea

 

Some of you may have noticed this in the dashboard if you were working on your articles.  There is a page here that will allow people to post their blog article ideas and then other members can claim them

 

http://blog.brickpicker.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=idea-manage

(just go into the dashboard area and you will see a menu option for Article Ideas)

 

Only logged in members will have access to this page.  You can post as many ideas as you want.  When someone claims your idea, you will get notified that someone did (right now just a very generic message, but will be enhanced).

 

For those that claim the idea, a button will show up that will say "Write",  please click this link to start writing the blog.  This will tie it all together so that in the end, the person that came up with the article idea will be awarded 50 Brickpoints just for the idea.

Lets test this out and see how it works. Hopefully it will keep things organized and promote good content.