/jp/ - Otaku Culture

>>40339786
so ive been watching ebay for a while and have a couple theories, but lemme get it out of the way that i have sold on ebay before. granted, i sold at prices well below $100, so im not of the scalper variety. i just got really lucky in a sale and got more fumos than i knew what to do with, and so sold the excess stock to hopefully spread the love.

that said, around the time i was selling fumos, a typical fumo price was around $150, on average. that's what was being sold on ebay time and time again. and this was before the MTO sales started being a thing.

now i'm checking ebay and seeing prices for brand-new fumos selling around $110-125, with a few going below $100 as of late. as you mentioned, MTO is the primary driver of this, but whats weird is that the prices of EVERY fumo variety has seemingly gone down (save for the immortally scalped Cirno, poor girl). as of now, i can see a Rumia for $85, an Eirin for $89.10, and a Reimu for $100--all new, in their packaging. why is this? would not only the fumos being sold MTO be reduced in price, as you've postulated?

well, here's what i think is going on. scalpers are profit-driven, single-minded entities that exist solely to leech off of a fad. you had the same thing with beanie babies back in the mid-late 90's. the price of the plushies went WAY beyond their initial sale value because people wanted le famous ploosh. but it wasn't just that they were famous; it was also that they were scarce. only so many of each beanie baby was ever made available for sale, and beanie babies were retired after a while to keep them valuable.

but the second you take away that scarcity, for any product on the product line, by introducing MTO, that illusion starts to shatter for resalers. they don't know if THEIR resold plushies will be next on the metaphorical chopping block. simultaneously, buyers now know feel that they can afford to sit tight and wait for their plushies to be sold MTO instead of buying from a resaler at an exorbitant markup. these two phenomena fuel each other, and so prices fall for ALL products, save for ones released recently like Renko and Miko that still have a perceived scarcity to them. (after all, Gift probably won't make their newest products MTO, they'd probably start from their oldest and most recognizable and move "down" from there)

as for why Gift ever went MTo to begin with, i'd imagine they don't exactly love their products being resold at insane markups and them not getting any of that money. once they had the capital to move to MTO in batches, they likely went for it to capitalize on the fad, but tell resalers to eat a dick and let the original manufacturer get the profits.

tl;dr yes, i do think the ebay scalpers will be dying off, and the resale value of fumos as a whole will hopefully drop over the next year or two due to perceived increase in supply.

for those who read, here's my Kasen as thanks for the trouble.