Selling used vintage and antique watch parts can be a tricky business, not only identifying what you have in front of you – often thousands of parts are unlabelled in containers, but also in determining what something is worth.
This is by no means a “price justification” article! but designed to inform our customers about how prices are determined on our items.
We utilise a number of search history tools such as Worthpoint, Invaluable and to be honest have a good knowledge of the market as a whole.
Having also sold many thousands of items on Ebay, we utilise sales history and Terapeak on the platform to look at what the same or similar items have sold for recently. Then we always set the price at an amount that is the same as or lower than market value.
If we have a certain tool or item where many are available, we will always make ours the cheapest.
On our website we are aiming to make things even cheaper as our transaction fees are lower than selling on Ebay. So we want to pass some of that saving onto our customers.
Sometimes, there are no means to determine market value for certain parts. In these instances we look at what we have in front of us and set a price that we deem to be reasonable.
Take for example a container of antique pocket watch sub seconds hands.
Gold hands, antique container and over 100 years old! About 70 pieces in the container, we would think that £49.99 would be a reasonable price for such a lot of parts (and we have sold many examples like this previously)
About £0.70 per piece for antique, gold, most likely hand finished parts seems a great price. Especially considering suppliers of new modern parts are charging around £2 per hand for sub-seconds hands that were made months ago.