Have you ever significantly overpaid for an item?

[thundermoo]

I can remember as a kid Walmart sold mystery graded yugioh cards for like $20. I can remember being super excited thinking for the price it would be something good…turned out to be some garbage bulk card and it wasn’t even a good grade…still chaps my ass thinking about it 13ish years later

[exomemphiz]

@degreen11

A couple of weeks ago I purchased a shadowless zard for $250 thinking it was NM from the pictures. Turns out it was damaged as hell and the pictures were misleading

That’s not really overpaying, that’s being scammed, and you should definitely seek to get a refund.

Best of luck to you

[kpod]

With very rare items, there is no such thing as overpaying as there is not enough market data to define what the “market price” is or should be. Market price on those items is whatever the highest bidder/buyer is willing to pay. Sure the next time that card comes on the market, it may sell for less than you paid, but that doesn’t mean you overpaid on your purchase because at that time, you had no idea if/when another one would come on the market.

With Pokemon cards, I think the biggest place where someone would overpay is on an ungraded card that they think will earn a specific grade, so they pay a hefty premium due to it’s condition, and it comes back from grading way lower, and they could have bought that exact same grade for much less than their ungraded purchase.

I see this a lot on eBay, where sellers are charging such a premium for mint cards that very likely will come back as a PSA 9 or less yet they are asking near the same price or within $30 of a graded card. Occasionally you can get a steal, but most of my mint purchases lately have been from sellers where I’m buying out their entire holo inventory in bulk and they never even hit eBay. When you factor in grading at $15 total cost per card, I know then even if the card comes back with a less than desirable grade, I can flip it and break even.

[ccharizardd]

@shizzlemetimbers

I feel sorry for all the people who were buying/collecting Eng. PSA 10 EXs a year or two ago, I paid around $180AUD for M Gyarados EX probably worth $80ish now. There were worse examples out there I am sure, I swear some EXs were sold for close to 1k AUD but I might be mis-remembering

Same with full arts! some were going for $300-400 each. i sold 2 for $350 each and now they’re worth 80-100 max :\ i feel bad for the people that thought they were going to increase

[kkthxbai]

All the time… haha

Still even being In this hobby for a long time. There’s days I get home and like… what did I do!

Usually happens with toys or things I’m unfamiliar with, or if I miss damage on items. Or yes… The dreaded fomo…

And hype… all these factors suck!.

[quuador]

Lol, all the time. I have over unique 1100 Pikachus, and I can’t be too picky about price or condition when one pops up I don’t have yet.

So I usually pay like 20-50 USD for cards that are probably worth about 10-20 USD.

There are however two cards I can name for which I overpaid quite a bit:

• 175/XY-P with Event Organizer stamp. Bought two of them for 1600 USD. Halve a year later they were for sale every now and then for 150 USD each.
• Pokémon with YOU XY-P promo. It hadn’t been for sale for over 3 years, so when the first one popped up everyone bid on it. I eventually lost it, and it went for around 135,000 Japanese Yen (~1200 USD). Second copy emerged just a few hours later, and was sold for about 95,000 Japanese Yen (~850 USD) within a few hours. Third one that popped up I placed a bit on of 77,777 Japanese Yen. But in the next two days ten more popped up, lowest being around 55,000 Japanese Yen and in better condition then the one I placed my 77,777 bid on as well. I ended up winning it for 77,000 Japanese Yen… The one time you want to get outbid, you win it at your absolute maximum. Including middleman services, shipping costs, and import fees, I paid around 950 USD for it in total. Considering halve a year later (and now still) they are available for 250-350 USD, I should have been more patient. Then again, if those were the only ones that would have popped up, I would have regretted it for not going higher to make sure I win it. Ah well, you win some you loose some.

Greetz,
Quuador

[alovell]

@pichufan

I wouldn’t say I’m good with knowing when not to purchase anything, but I don’t think I’ve ever overpaid for a card. Usually I chicken out when the price gets to a certain point, and quite often that comes back to bite me - I have a few regrets for not paying overprice at the time for cards which are now a lot harder to find. There are a few Pichus I’d love to have in PSA 10 which right now I do believe are significantly overprice, like the 1st Edition Neo Genesis (~$450) and e-reader holo (~$250); but I also thought these were overprice a few years ago when they were significantly cheaper than they are now.

I agree. I think that the only time I ever overpaid is when I first got into the hobby and started buying up random people’s collection. I didn’t understand how important condition was back then and so I thought i was getting a great deal but I obtaining MP-HP collections that were handled by kids I suspect and not collectors. But generally speaking, I’m so conservative that I think I have had too many regrets on purchases that I should have made. I’m okay waiting for the right price but sometimes I think I should have just bit the bullet and overpaid slightly for a card that I really wanted.