Question on Playbill Value?

[Moritat]

Posted: 2/17/19 at 2:49pm

I have acquired a large # of Playbills from around 1976 thru 1984. I would like to sell some of them on Ebay, but there is one issue. Although most of them are very clean (near mint condition), the person that owned these wrote a small date with pen in the very top right hand corner (in the white area just above the "LL" of Playbill). On some there is also a name or two. I know this writing will hurt the value, but I'm wondering how much?  Are these now worthless because of the writing?  Another question....  most of these have the ticket stub to go along with the Playbill. Does that increase value at all?  Thanks so much for your information.

[Rainah]

Posted: 2/17/19 at 3:35pm

Honestly playbill value is super subjective. How much will it hurt the value? No idea until you actually post it. A few people won't care, some will care a lot. Depends on how rare the playbill is. I wouldn't buy an In The Heights playbill with writing on it, because they crop up regularly, but if it was an Ars Nova Comet? That's a different story.

Demand for most older playbills is middling at best anyways. Mostly ticket stubs do not have value, but again it depends on the individual you're selling to.

[haterobics]

Posted: 2/17/19 at 3:56pm

I think the best strategy for selling on eBay is that if you are wanting to get rid of them, they have no value to you. That's the best place to start. If you think something is worth $30 and you price it at $30, then it is likely to not sell (unless you vastly underestimated what you are selling).

I think the best strategy for eBay, and what I always use, is to start everything as 10-day auction with no reserve price and no Buy It Now, and start everything at a penny. Also, be sure you are setting everything up properly as far as shipping/handling so that you don't lose money. If these are valuable (again, who knows? But if you think they are), then I would invest in flat mailers to ensure they arrive the same as when you ship them. And include that you are shipping them in flat mailers that cost $0.45 each (or whatever the actual price is in bulk on Amazon), and add that cost as a handling charge to every order.

Now that you've zero-summed your side of things, you just let bidders set the price for you. The reason you want to start at a penny is that for 9.5 days of your 10 day auction, it is largely irrelevant what the bidding is. For that time, the most value is how many watchers you get for your items. And as the end approaches, all of your early bidders and watchers will start getting emails alerting them to the end of the listing approaching.

A good indication you have decent stuff on offer is if people start messaging you for something currently bid up to 40 cents offering you $25 to take down the auction and sell it to them. I never do that, and just say I wouldn't feel right selling something going for 40 cents at 25 dollars, they should just bid and win it for 50 cents!

The majority of your action will be in the last hour and then the last five minutes and then the last minute. Those are the three major waves, when people start bidding it up way more than it was to sort of indicate to others that it is in play (to try and shake them off). This is the psychology of eBay and essentially what you are trying to benefit from.

The way sniping works, which is when people win a bid in the last five seconds, is people usually put INSANE amounts in as their final bid, so that eBay will outbid anyone else's crazy bid and they win. When I sold Broadway magnets once, one buyer put $400 as their top price for every magnet they wanted in the last few seconds. And one or two went slightly up over $100 as a result, since someone else went a bit more sanely and set their maximum bid at $100, prompting the system to bid one bid increment over them for the person who offered $400 right before closing the auction and declaring a winner.

And often the stuff I think is worth the most goes for very little, and things I'd've just as soon tossed in the trash goes crazy. So, I think the easiest way to sell something like this is to accept that it has no value to you, and then use all of the psychological triggers eBay has enabled to your benefit.

[BalconyClub]

Posted: 2/17/19 at 5:38pm

haterobics said: "I think the best strategy for selling on eBay ...

A great explanation. Thank you haterobics.

 

[Wick3]

Posted: 2/17/19 at 8:52pm

It's pretty much worth whatever amount someone is willing to pay for it (as can be seen from haterobics's post)

With eBay, timing is everything. Now that Merrily is back in off-broadway, if you have any playbills from the original cast of Merrily back in the early 1980s then I think that might sell well.