|
How To Buy Brand Name Guitars On The Cheap
Music buffs and specifically guitar lovers are always seeking best prices on both new and used guitars. Especially prevalent since the movement of guitars is pretty fluid, evidenced by the large number of guitar stores found in any mid-size town in America. Guitarists are forever upgrading or enhancing - and yes sometimes even downsizing or simply giving up! - there musical instruments.There is a web site (link below) which lists some of the finest brand name guitars and monitors there pricing on a minute by minute basis. The best place to find a huge guitar market in undoubtedly eBay. So this listing is made up by polling eBay on a regular continuous basis, and collecting some vital 'insider' statistics that can help you make much more informed buys.With a large volume of guitars being traded everyday, this is the ideal near efficient market. One can study the dynamics of this micro-market and determine some useful buying rules. With a little more information than the rest of the marketplace, one can almost certainly make some intelligent buying opportunities. This article focuses on how to identify these gaps and often purchase brand name guitars for nearly 50% below retail.This article should be read together with my longer piece and a web site, which produces the information required to identify buying nuggets. Find the links and URLs to these two sites at the bottom of this article. Here is a small sample of some of the brands it searches each day;Hamer Guitars, Ibanez, Italia Guitars, Jackson, Johnson Musical Instruments, Kramer, Line 6, Michael Kelly, OLP Guitars, Parker Guitar.There is one more aspect that makes this site useful. That is it holds information that is often more difficult for the buyer to obtain. With this information in hand buyers can often make more informed and better decisions and therefore avoid bidding wars and outsmart other bidders to a high degree.Most information on eBay focuses on the selling element, i.e. how to sell your guitar. I have tended to specialize on the buying end and trying to identify market opportunities and price in-efficiencies to really capture excellent deals. To do this we need to understand the dynamics of the eBay market place. Like any other market it is supply demand driven, and like a large flee-market if a buyer has knowledge of how many items are for sale at what prices and how many other buyers are in the market, then that buyer can capture the upper hand. Lets focus a little more on supply.The eBay supply dynamic is a little different in that supply of an item must be seen at a point in time. In other words, because auctions end at different times, one needs to grasp the number of auctions ending in close proximity for the same item. This gives you a feel for the supply of items or in our case cameras. What makes
this interesting
is that today there could be a large amount of auctions ending for
a particular model, but next week there could be very few. This is
one element driving the price.The demand side is slightly more complex
and hidden from the average eBay buyer. This is where that the web
site I refer to at below has some useful data. Demand in eBay terms
is measured (by sellers) as a number of factors - how many people view
my auction, how many people ask questions, how many people place me
on their watch page, and how many people actually bid. Obviously as
we progress down this list the data become more reliable as an indication
of demand. Page views are not easy to obtain, although some sellers
place a publicly viewable counter on their auction pages. Questions
and watchers are available to sellers, and the special web site mentioned
below will expose this information. Number of bids is available for
all to see.Now if we happened to produce a graph as the auction progresses
of the changes in the number of questions, watchers and bids one can
easily see how the demand is changing as time progresses. Typically
if questions are high and watchers are high, but bids are low, this
may indicate some confusion (for example a spelling mistake in a model
number) and a possible buy opportunity. If watchers are very high and
climbing, but bids are low, this can point to a last minute bidding
war, and a stay out indicator.Armed with this information and also
a quick summary of other similar auctions ending soon, plus a quick
feel for the skill set of the seller and the current highest bidder,
one can see a picture very different from the average eBay buyer. Soon
the trained eye will observe some nice buying opportunities. Guitar
musicians, relish the opportunity to get a one up on our fellow buyers.
Look carefully at the data presented, after a little practice opportunities
will leap out at you. The premise is simple, a buyer with more market
information will always pay lower prices than the rest of the market.
In stock market
terms it caller insider trading, and its illegal. In our case its quite
above board and simply assists you in better understanding the supply
demand curve for that BC Rich Floyd Rose http://brandnameguitarbargains.com/eb/BC-Rich/
for your next gig.Resources;
|
