Pricing guidelines

[Waggy]

Hello all,

I need some guidance, I'm thinking of offloading some of my watches that I have restored as my collection is getting a bit excessive....disapproving looks from Mrs W. 

What I would like to know is:

• How do you go about pricing your watches for sale, what is a reasonable price, bearing in mind the cost of the watch plus time and materials to refurbish it etc. I have looked at Chrono24, but these prices are all over the place and I think they are charging top end (or are they?). Any advice on a good way to gauge the price of my items would be greatly appreciated.
• On a related matter what kind of warranty do you offer on any watches you sell or repair/service?
• I'm thinking that further down the road I may take in watches to service, but I'm concerned about the risk of junking an expensive watch and being on the hook for replacement... how do you handle this?

Apologies for the naivety of these questions, but this is my first time going down this path.

I would eBay... but it is practically free to bring stuff into the UAE.... but crazy expensive to send stuff out, see example quote below for a 0.5kg 10x10x10 cm box from UAE to UK:

Note: AED 325 is about US$ 88.48 (£71.97).... no i didn't misplace the decimal point....

 

The local postal service is just as expensive, so I am restricted to selling locally.

[rehajm]

Yikes- you’re up against it on shipping Waggy. For my work in the US we only use DHL for international time sensitive documents. Is FedEx any better?

[Waggy]

48 minutes ago, rehajm said:

FedEx any better?

Even more expensive, they are all roughly the same price

So how do you price your items? And handle the issue of warranty?

[eccentric59]

First I'd like to second that "Yikes".  I know shipping has gotten expensive, but ... Yikes!

As for pricing ... "fair" is determined by the market so I'd do a little research on what watch models you intend to sell are going for all over the place. And then it comes down to marketing. Good pictures and a better description with some history if available. For example

"Here's an old fixed-up Seiko. It's yours for $15." vs. "A lovingly restored vintage heirloom timepiece from the classic era of Japanese mechanical craftmanship for only a $1,200.00 investment."

As for the shipping, I'd include it in the price of the watch and offer "free shipping". You'd be surprised how gullible  much of an incentive it is.  

[rehajm]

23 minutes ago, eccentric59 said:

As for the shipping, I'd include it in the price of the watch and offer "free shipping". You'd be surprised how gullible  much of an incentive it is.  

...for Waggy shipping costs more than the watch!

[Waggy]

2 hours ago, rehajm said:

.for Waggy shipping costs more than the watch!

Yes it makes it prohibitively expensive to sell out of country for me. Unless I do a Dell Boy and leave the country with a suitcase full of watches "no money back, no guarantee...."

Ha ha

[JohnR725]

2 hours ago, eccentric59 said:

First I'd like to second that "Yikes".  I know shipping has gotten expensive, but ... Yikes!

Shipping isn't always cheap even way back when. I was ordering micro radio control components from a company in Canada and they shipped by UPS. I think it had to do with their own mail system was very very bad so the used UPS. The problem was in the discussion groups the people were upset because UPS didn't tell you something up front. In other words you would get your package shipping would be whatever it was that later on you would get a bill for the paperwork the customs declaration and that was a separate charge which they were upset about. Or you could shipped overnight air and it included everything and I think was like $50. So every time I ordered I had to pay $50 to avoid getting charged that the paperwork fee and that was quite a number years ago. So a lot of this depends upon the country you live etc. as to what they do. There's a lot of people in Europe that are very upset about getting something even from cousins because their country will tack on all sorts of silly taxes pushing the cost up astronomically shipping might be good but just getting the parties a very expensive

6 hours ago, Waggy said:

• How do you go about pricing your watches for sale, what is a reasonable price, bearing in mind the cost of the watch plus time and materials to refurbish it etc. I have looked at Chrono24, but these prices are all over the place and I think they are charging top end (or are they?). Any advice on a good way to gauge the price of my items would be greatly appreciated.
• On a related matter what kind of warranty do you offer on any watches you sell

One of the things to do is go and look at eBay for pricing and in particular look at the items that were sold do not look at the prices people think they should get for this stuff what the stuff actually sell for that's what you want to look at. Then warranty can be an issue as people like the play with their watches or find some hidden flaw that you didn't know existed so warranties can be definitely an issue. Which is probably why on eBay everybody says no returns in other words you have lots of pictures and they make a choice based on your pictures.

6 hours ago, Waggy said:

I'm thinking that further down the road I may take in watches to service, but I'm concerned about the risk of junking an expensive watch and being on the hook for replacement... how do you handle this?

I'm not going to give you the website what's interesting about the question is somebody on this group I looked at their secret identity name as it was not look like a company logo. So I looked up the company name and saw they service watches for people and they claim to be a hobbyist which is why they can do it so cheap. Now the reality is even if you were a professional you could charge wholesale prices if you are doing work on line. In other words instead charging for retail yet have a wholesale price and wholesale prices vary between who is actually doing it. Lotta times things would be 50% the retailers hundred dollars you would typically charge $50 other shops like where I work it's more of a percentage. I believe at one time my boss tried to set the price for the jewelry stores but typically jewelry stores were always double stuff occasionally they'll triple it so it's best to figure out what it actually cost to do business and charge that

oh and most the time people don't have any idea what it actually cost to do their business. In other words if you're going to repair watches and make money and you're not going to do it as a hobby.

Let's break down something as a hobby you can purchase watches broken fix them up sell them at a small amount of money probably not recover your costs which I'll explain below and use the money to purchase another watch to have fun. Or I used to know somebody who would sell typically pocket watches and I was trying to figure out what exactly he was really doing. In other words he purchase watches he restored them to new condition they were very nice. Apparently the real purpose of his business was to allow him to get watches for his collection and everything else was just a way of paying for that.

Now if you're doing this to make money then things changed dramatically. Like how much is your time worth per hour? You ideally should cover the cost of rent of the location you read cover the cost of all your tools all your supplies and then prices will change dramatically. Although and what about the overhead of time in other words somehow a job comes to you he would have to do some paperwork bookkeeping when you ship the watch out you're not preparing the watch so you do have to charge for that time there's a lot of other charges included.

Then the risk of destroying valuable things. This comes back to the unnamed person on this discussion group somewhere where I can't even say the last question he was asking is struggling with an expensive watch and that's where I saw the website where I'm a hobbyist I charge a fraction of the professionals and was working on a watch that he had no business working on and have destroyed the balance wheel. So I suppose you can put on your website I am a hobbyist I really cheap and I might destroy your watch and it's your fault for sending it to me I would consult with an attorney to see if you get away with that. I'm not sure that he actually said that on the website but it would be a factor of if you get a Rolex and you break something it will be expensive. This is why typically what watch shops do is charge enough money to cover breakage basically on an average of your watches. You might not billet cover everything in one watch but on average.

So for instance and this approximation because I don't actually memorize battery changing prices I think our cheapest battery change price is $20. All the way up to maybe $80 for high-end watch. The batteries are basically the same cost now we do charge more because all the watches go in a dry modern pressure checking machine and a half things are darned expensive at all watches within reason I restored back to water resistance so we offer a bonus service. In other words if you give us a water resistant watch will return it in the same condition versus other places where your watch may fill with water the first time you get near it because they have no idea. But the big reason of the price difference is more expensive watches it's basically like an insurance policy they're paying a bonus price for high-end watches in case you have an accident

so the reality is you have to charge more money for more valuable watches because accidents will happen. It's really hard to offload the responsibility onto the customer that it's their fault for being stupid enough to give you a watch. Now if you get really concerned You can investigate in insurance. I had heard a story of somebody who is authorized to service can't remember the brand of watches where she got insurance policy for working on stone dials because of your break a stone dial it's very expensive. I didn't even know such a thing existed as an insurance policy for that type of work. Another shop no long time ago was authorized to do Rolex watches I believe what he did was charged twice the price like putting in a new crystal of what the cost of the crystal was Sophie breaks one his price would cover the second one but unfortunately realistically it probably should be 2 1/2 times

a yes pricing of watch repair is an interesting subject. Because of you look at other discussion groups they've gotten used to basically hobbyists who repair watches for the fun of it because they could not possibly be making any money if they were taking into account rent wages business expenses. So on this other group they frown on prices that seem too high based on unrealistic pricing that they gotten used to. It used to be that they thought a pocket watch could be repaired for less than $50 I think right now they think anything over $100 is expensive although there was a discussion recently of somebody saying is this a good price and I think in general that thought it was too high. For which I find amusing because are starting price is higher than what they thought was too high.

 

[Waggy]

Thanks for the very thorough answer, lots to digest here, but a great answers to my questions.